


Zeta Protocol

by aurora_ff



Series: (Time is) A Bullet from Behind [7]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Baseball, Bucky Barne's notebook, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Comics/Movie Crossover, Denial of Feelings, Dreams and Nightmares, Everyone Has Issues, Explicit Consent, Extreme Unresolved Issues of All Sorts, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Flashbacks, Hacking, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra (Marvel), INCREDIBLY SLOW BURN, Memory Loss, Native American/First Nations Cultures, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Captain America: Civil War, Safehouses, Slow Burn, Trains, Unresolved Emotional Tension, WIP, Wilderness, Wolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-29 23:00:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 52,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6397480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_ff/pseuds/aurora_ff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has been just over a year since S.H.I.E.L.D. fell and the Winter Soldier disappeared from the banks of the Potomac in Washington DC. While not teaming up with the Avengers, Natasha takes side-missions to fund her private safe houses and aliases. She didn’t expect Bucky Barnes to come out of hiding, hiring her to break the encryptions on a number of HYDRA files he had stolen. </p><p>Uncertain of his motives, Natasha agrees to the job only if he accompanies her to an isolated location within the Rocky Mountains. In the days that it takes for her to hack the drives, Natasha struggles with her feelings for a man who remembers nothing of her. Bucky struggles with rebuilding his own self-identity and his attraction to Natasha. What they eventually uncover from HYDRA has deadly implications.</p><p>Alternating Bucky & Natasha POVs. Wilderness settings. Cozy cabins. PTSD. And at least one wolf. </p><p>MCU/Comic 616 Fusion, with the Winter Soldier and Natasha having a shared Red Room history that she remembers but he doesn’t.</p><p>Active WIP - Updated every few weeks.</p><p>  <i>Warning: Contains mentions of attempted suicide. I'll flag the most intense chapters as needed.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Natasha

This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. Her lawyer, Isaiah, was supposed to do all the negotiations with the clients and protect her identity. All she was supposed to do is evaluate the provided intel, read the mission parameters, and decide whether the reward was worth the risk. Isaiah was supposed to _vet_ these shadowy people and their shadowy needs; that was what she was paying him for. 

He hadn’t been paid in a few months. Neither had some of her landlords in Europe and North Africa. 

Avengers business, she explained.

Increasingly unreasonable standards, her lawyer suggested.

So when this latest job promised a quarter-million dollars, if, and only if, she would meet the prospective client in-person to get the details, Natasha relented.

That’s what had her on a northbound Amtrak train from Penn Station to Albany, her roundtrip coach ticket helpfully provided by said Mystery Client in the name of one of her aliases. 

She had the window seat, and for a whole fifteen minutes after the train departed from the platform, swallowing it in the darkness of Manhattan tunnels to be spit out somewhere towards Yonkers, the spot beside her was vacant.

Natasha had dressed comfortably and casually for the journey, in a printed sundress with a thin cashmere sweater. Her large purse was a knock-off of a designer label, however, hiding Black Widow tech in various pockets and linings. Her brown wig had just the right amount of highlights to make her guise seem in touch with fashion, if not able to afford everything.

From the massive bag, she pulled out a Harlequin romance, a series featuring a hunky, shapeshifting hero on the cover, another knock-off of at least two supernatural bestsellers in the past ten years. The reading was not what Natasha cared for, but it was a part of her cover. And eye-rollingly amusing at times.

She scanned the pages as she waited, only stopping to provide her ticket and ID in a rather bored-like-fashion to the attendant that came by before the next stop, some ten minutes up the track. While her eyes skipped over the words, her ears were keen to the chit-chat around her, assessing threats. 

There was always a risk with these jobs, this one in particular. She considered that she was being baited into a trap. The Black Widow had enemies. The Avengers even more.

She heard another set of footsteps down the aisle behind her. One individual, a heavier gait than most women. Disciplined, as if marching; military training then. Maybe another ticket-taker. Probably the client or his designated representative.

She flipped the paperback’s page. At five meters, the cadence of his footsteps slowed, faltered. Uncertainty or nervousness. Now two meters away.

Natasha reached towards the concealed Beretta holstered to her left thigh a she listened for the other passengers’ reactions to the man passing through their personal space.

Nothing usual. He blended in well enough, then. She wasn’t going to have to duck a bullet and return a few of her own. Just in her periphery, he lifted his black duffelbag to the overhead railings, She looked over her right shoulder to size up the man.

Natasha whipped her chin forward again and froze. It _couldn’t_ be. Not him.

His longish dark-brown hair peeked underneath a navy ballcap. He moved with the half-hidden grace of a predator who didn’t want to spook her, ducking his head slightly away as soon as she had glanced in curiosity.

Fuck. No. Not him. No. No. No.

It was all Natasha could do to stare again at the sleazy novel, thinking _I’ve been made._ Thinking she was the most dead and most alive she had been since S.H.I.E.L.D. collapsed under her and Rogers’ doing.

Her seatmate cleared his throat as he slid beside her, resting his worn backpack between his knees. “Hey,” was all he offered, his storm-blue eyes she didn’t need to study to recall were locked upon the headrest in front of him. He stuffed his leather-gloved hands into the pockets of his worn-but-clean hoodie, as if obsessed with hiding them. He didn’t come off as a vagrant, but the wear to his combat boots told her he was always on the move.

Natasha’s heart beat wildly. She went from freezing to burning in an instant. This couldn’t be happening. God, no.

She had no defense. No defense but words.

“Steve’s an ocean away, spending every spare cent he has trying to track you down, and you have the _balls_ to walk within a half-mile of the Tower to play Strangers-on-a-Train with me?!” she hissed, glancing in quick flicks from him, to her book, to the front of the train-car for any backups. “You’re something, Barnes.”

She wasn’t the Black Widow for nothing. Every second she had was another second to determine exactly how much the Winter Soldier was a threat. He wasn’t about to assassinate her here; his behavior, this very scenario, was proof against that. The train was gaining speed.

He had shaved within the last twelve hours or so. He was as reluctant to meet her eyes as she was his.

“Steve’s looking for someone he’ll never find,” Barnes returned, tiredly. There was a darkness under his eyes that spoke of lack of sleep. “And I can’t...I’m not going near Stark.”

Natasha no longer pretended to read her book. “Then what do you want with me?”

The twenty-five-hundred thousand dollar question.

“I need your help,” he confessed, beginning in English and then switching to Russian. “I’ve been to places...places I remember being stationed. I took their drives, but there’s files on them with security encryptions. There’s other things I swiped too.” He finally gazed sideways at her. “I’m not a hacker. But you are.”

“You can’t have a quarter mil just lying around,” Natasha returned. “Unless you’ve been robbing banks on the side.” 

It would be a simple thing, a new strategy of HYDRA’s to use the Soldier like a Trojan horse. She’d hook the drives up to the Tower’s network and unleash a virus or worm. Or even worse, take him inside and up to their suites because Steve couldn’t bear but to want his long-lost friend no more than a room away; then the Winter Soldier would attack when their guard was down. Paranoia kept her alive, and this had all the scent of a trap.

“It’s from gambling. Poker mostly.”

“You wouldn’t go near a casino’s surveillance,” she challenged, trying to find chinks in his story.

“The games aren’t quite...televised. But I play fair and no one tries anything when I leave the table. They learned not to.” He sighed, shook his head slightly. “You have no reason to trust me. I know that. I shot you and if it hadn’t been for Steve, I would have killed you.”

“So you remember me?” The priceless question, so casually delivered. The answer was an answer for a lifetime past, as the question belonged to the girl of the Red Room that defied everyone for the love of her Soldier. Natasha indulged her. Just this once.

“I saw the DC footage online. Everyone has a camera on their phones now. Pierce didn’t care when he gave me the mission. Letting me be seen in broad daylight. He didn’t think it mattered.” He shrugged, then finally glanced at her reflection in the glass window when they went through an underpass, she catching it from the corner of her eye.

Not even Odessa was left to them.

There was something else in Barnes’ voice then. “Natasha. I can’t say how sorry I am...for hurting--”

“Please, stop,” she cut in. “Just stop.”

The words came with a hard and cool edge to deflect the weakness she felt at having her name, the shadow of her name, pass through his lips.

Barnes clamped his mouth shut, stiffening. His hands moved in his hoodie pocket. Either stripping his glove or reaching for a weapon.

“I’m not a fucking therapist, so I’m only going to tell this to you once, and I don’t care if you take it to heart or not,” Natasha said, even though she very much cared, damn her. “HYDRA fucked with you. What they couldn’t convince you of, they forced upon you. Brainwashing, manipulation, using your mind as playground. I get it. It’s not your fault, any of it.”

He sighed, took his hat off and raking his right hand through his hair to neaten the ragged lengths. “So you’ll help me?”

“I haven’t decided that yet,” she returned. Because she hadn’t. She didn’t know if she was up to the risk. Up to either confessing or withholding from Steve that Bucky Barnes, best childhood friend that he would do anything for, came to _her_ and not him for help.

“You’re the only one I could think of,” Barnes said, stuffing the ballcap in a mesh pocket of his pack. He tried another angle. “The Avengers can have the data, too, all of it. I just need another lead and a few days’ head start.”

Natasha began running through ways she could protect herself while still completing the job.

“Are the drives here with you?” she inquired.

“Yeah.” He lightly kneed his backpack.

“Give me a little bit to think,” she returned.

“Deal’s off if you tell or text anyone about this. About me. I mean it. Not the archer, not even Steve.” He began to stand. “You’re not putting me in a cell ‘for my own good’, observation bull-shit or no.”

After decades of being a caged and collared prize, it was understandable. Natasha frowned. Perhaps it was as Barnes said it was. A job. Maybe this way the only way he’d allow himself to reapproach Steve. Through her. Sideways, tentatively. Like an abused animal.

He grabbed his duffel and returned to English. “Cafe car in twenty minutes. Then I’ll need your answer, Miss Lamar.”

“Twenty minutes. Sure,” she agreed, watching his back as he advanced up the aisle and through the doors separating the cars.

Natasha pulled out her StarkPhone and began getting to work. “Here I thought you _hated_ trains,” she muttered. She tried to be glum about the whole situation, but she couldn’t help a small, amused quirk of a smile pass over her lips as she prepared her next move.


	2. Bucky

Buck was glad for the space, of putting some distance between him and one of his former marks for a little while. Three rail-car lengths. A hundred yards. 

The Black Widow unnerved him.

He opened up the door at the end of the car, feeling the brief sucking of wind in the diaphragm before he reached the next. His gut had a sinking feeling every time the pressure changed on his route.

He convinced himself again that she was the only one that could get past the encryptions on HYDRA’s files and still manage to keep her source a secret. They had a common enemy, even if that would never make them friends.

The Black Widow unsettled him in a very particular and peculiar way. Not simply because she was one of the few operatives in the world clever and adaptive enough to get the upperhand on the Winter Soldier, but because he caught himself almost wanting her to.

_Then run now. Throw yourself off the train. You’ll live._

Fuck that.

* * *

In the aftermath of the Potomac and the declaration of his handler’s death over the device in his ear, the Winter Soldier knew only one thing: HYDRA had conscripted him into waging a war he never lusted for. If he stayed exposed any longer with the target-friend-enemy-brother at his feet, rescued and being rescued in turn (somehow again and again and again), he’d never have a chance to understand anything more than this horrible moment of clarity in the midst of a chaotic battlefield.

There was a chopping in the air. There was a voice trying to appeal to his thousand pieces. A siren’s song. 

Soon - _now_ \- if he didn’t move, he’d be taken and mistaken for what he was and wasn’t and never wanted to be.

He called to instinct as his only guide. 

He melted into cover.

While all the emergency responders in the DC area scrambled in the chaos, he returned to the vault and HYDRA’s base-of-operations for codename Winter Soldier, where generations of the powerful and wealthy had kept the things they valued but cared not to love.

Two white-coats there were arguing about what to do with themselves when he entered. He found the false mission report came easily from his lips when prompted, a Pyrrhic victory: Captain America was his final bounty. The Soldier refused a sedative when he ordered them to set his dislocated shoulder back into place; the pain of reseating it made him feel half-alive.

The techs nervously suggested he sit down on the prep-chair, his terrible throne, and wait for Rumlow to report in. It was that moment he lashed out, grabbing one of the techs by the throat while the other cowered behind the sight of his SIG Sauer.

The pleas for mercy by the dozen cried out in his skull. This once, just this once, there was no kill order. He had a choice.

He let the two survive for the location of another HYDRA facility in New York and a set of civilian clothes.

Before he left, he destroyed the chair he so often submitted to in the name of duty, wires and plates sparking in violent fireworks that teased of national celebration under his foot and fist.

He went to Pierce’s expansive home. As he passed by old family photos of the Secretary, he was struck by the familiarity of his blond hair, the blue eyes.

_‘You’re my friend.’_

Targets weren’t--

Commanders weren’t--

He wasn’t--

Who was he?

_’Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.’_

He broke into Pierce’s safe for money, another handgun, and the man’s departed-wife’s jewelry. He raided the closets and kitchen pantry. With a permanent marker he scrawled on the inside of his right arm _James Buchanan Barnes,_ so that in the hours to come, he could reference and return to it, have it serve as the first beacon back to...to someone else.

As the sky darkened, with the scent of ash and the funk of estuary water still in his hair, his body began to revolt. He hallucinated voices of authorities and doctors offering him whatever was needed. Just turn himself in, give himself back to the needles and the orders. 

Faces of the dead, his kills, lurked in the shadows around him. Behind every blink, he was confronted with the fatal stab of a blade, the cooly intimate executions at close range, the anonymous assassinations from afar. All he had to do to make it stop was to go back to HYDRA.

He tried running away from them till his leg ached, but they always kept up.

He found a dark, enclosed place and put bullet holes in musty walls just to assure he was alone in the torment. He screamed till his throat offered nothing but wheezes. He lifted the muzzle of his pistol again and again to the base of his skull, trying to end it, but his shaking fingers would not cooperate.

In scant moments of lucidity, he recognized he lay in an abandoned basement of a derelict house on a stained mattress, dirty daylight leaking through cracks in a cellar door, stinking in his own sweat and gazing at pools of cold vomit and urine nearby. Or he would snap back to awareness on a city rooftop or fire escape, trembling and clutching a knife or improvised weapon with his metal fist yet with no victim in sight. Keeping track of anything so fundamental as time failed him.

There were vagrants in whatever depressed geography of concrete and rust he had wandered into. The elderly and frail of them came into his periphery thanking him for what he did in that alley or this dead-end. He couldn't remember; he didn’t want to cause trouble; he just needed to be left alone. People not of this underworld were looking for him, but he was in no shape to be found.

Finally, he had a dawn and dusk that hadn’t disappeared on him, so he dropped down cash for a few nights in a seedy motel room to clean himself up and begin his hunt for answers. 

A newspaper told him he had lost a full nine days since SHIELD’s collapse.

His once-target’s image in red, white, and blue -- Steve? Yes, him. The man on the riverbank -- was on a bus-stop billboard. _A hero to the world, a treasure to the nation._ That brought him to the Smithsonian. It brought him to face his own phantom. 

The facts of Barnes’ life were undeniable and interwoven with Rogers’, but they only tumbled around in the hollowness of him, nothing taking root, nothing to feel. Speculation of what occurred at the Triskelion washed over him in the throng of voices there until he became yet another spectator to the flashes of his own fractured recollection.

Still, he wrote his biographical data in a small spiral notepad he kept in his stolen jacket, wondering if one day that any actual memories would add color to the facts and make a proof of their own.

In the hours and days that followed, he began to build a cover. A pawn shop owner lead him to a bookie, who lead him to another individual willing to match him up with a valid identity for the right price. Somewhere in Virginia, there was a six-foot tall Iraq War veteran with blue eyes and brown hair that was the recent victim of a hit-and-run. A tragedy that left him with no working legs and mounting bills. 

For fifty-grand, Zachary Sheridan, he of honorable discharge and no outstanding warrants, walked again on the feet of a doppelganger. Practically a boy scout. That notion somehow _struck_ Buck with vague humor and he noted it down as one of the few impressions that arose from his fragmented memories weren’t about violence, blood, and fear.

The cover fit well. Being in the Shit gave him burns on his left arm and torso on that tour, justified the thin glove and long sleeves. Sandbox Zach, near-strangers nicknamed him. Happy to bring his pension to underground poker rooms; deadly enough to not be roughed up by cronies when the cards went his way and not the house’s. The ease, the instinct of the game, was yet another observation he noted about his former-self. It seems that there were parts of him that hadn’t been tampered with after all. That was a small triumph he devoted a whole two pages to recording.

He was approached about certain jobs; he turned them down.

He was approached by women on the street; he turned them down, too. HYDRA’s lost weapon seemed neutered of those desires, however intact his anatomy. He had tried arousing himself with a girly mag one evening in the motel, but he ended up tossing it in the trashcan like a used condom, the bloom of anger and frustration his only companion that restless night.

In the next week, the footage of a special congressional hearing aired again and again on the television in his run-down room. Front-and-center was _her_ , the redhead S.H.I.E.L.D. operative that tried to garrotte him and then shot at him with his own RPG on the Washington streets. Natasha Romanoff. Black Widow. She didn’t back down from the grilling; she was fearless. The Soldier respected her from their brief tangle but she also caused a vague uneasiness his newborn ragged and reaquainted sense of self. The woman had teeth. The niggling had him reaching to sharpen his small arsenal of combat knives. 

The lead of the HYDRA cell in New York took him to others scattered across North America. He began to learn there were factions, territories and turf carved out like cartels and crime bosses did. Not oppositional with one another necessarily, but siloed so as not to lose the whole organization with the death of one leader. Schmitt, the Red Skull, the Howling Commandos’ once-upon-a-war arch-nemesis, had only been a tip of the proverbial iceberg. SHIELD had been blind to other possibilities.

He left too many agents alive when he raided HYDRA’s places, but he could no longer make himself pull the trigger on those that surrendered. The Soldier knew it was sloppy when he could justify his revenge for lost decades in a blood-bath. But all he truly wanted was to destroy the machines that could reclaim him. All he hoped for was some records that would speak of the truth of the last seventy years and not more twisted lies spouted at the mouths of the powerful that kept him in their forever-war.

Another fifty-thousand dollars of poker winnings got him a passport. The real Sheridan had grown out his hair a bit for the photo.

Buck kept himself on the move, staying no more than a few weeks in large, anonymous cities where he could supplement his cash. All his worldly possessions fit in a backpack and a duffelbag. When he finished a history or current-affairs book, he abandoned it as soon as he finished jotting down the words that caused him another brief spark and rush of sensations and images. 

He bribed his way onto a cargo plane to Argentina to track down second and third generation sons and daughters of Schmitt’s regime, but they confessed of only vague notions of a new world order promised them. All they needed to do was scout talent and recruit amongst the other rich and powerful. It was almost like an old-time gentleman’s club; it made him sick.

On TV screens and computer monitors, faces of _Earth’s Mightiest Heroes_ often appeared, headquartered in midtown New York in Stark’s towering construction of glass and steel. Central to the team was Captain America but occasionally Black Widow was caught on footage, too. The Avengers’ mission was clear, Steve said in short interviews: Anyone that had designs on conquering the peoples of Earth, either extraterrestrial or domestic, was on notice, including HYDRA.

The Avengers were _good_. Steve was doing _good_. If Buck-Zach-Whoever showed up at their doorstep, he’d only be a pile of distraction and disappointment. He wasn’t that man that laughed and joked with Rogers in the Smithsonian footage. In fact, he couldn’t recall when he had last smiled. It was best to honor the golden memory, Buck decided, by not torturing Steve with the husk he was now.

And then there was Tony Stark. Something about the son of Mr. Howard Stark -- brilliant engineer, military contractor and playboy -- downright caused him nausea. Maybe it was because the billionaire was most everything that Steve Rogers of the bygone era _wasn’t_. For so many reasons, Buck had to...he had to stay away from them. Until he’d figure out if he could ever be more than the broken Soldier, someone that had something more to give the world than anger, torture, grief, and death and the sucking void of where a person should be.

In the six months since he started his quest for his answers, he had hit over a dozen facilities and safe houses, sometimes only a day before Rogers or his friend with the wingsuit or some other interested group arrived. As he went on, more and more facilities were abandoned, as if they had anticipated the raid, taking or erasing everything they stored on their drives and internal networks. His luck was running out. He had been too forgiving.

So he changed tactics, calling not on the marksman, demolition, and combat skills in his arsenal, but those of the spy. Get in, get HYDRA’s secrets from private residences or social clubs, and then depart without detection. The work of a shadow was easier to pick up than he anticipated, and at the end of the self-directed ops, with copies of computer and server drives in his pack, he was able to sleep for blessedly long hours after. 

The only problem with his new plan, he found, was that the files on those swiped drives often came with some-sort of encryption. No matter how much he paid and how much he warned, there was too much chance that revealing what was behind those electronic safeguards could very well usher anyone who helped him into his living-hell.

There was only one hacker in the world who had the right skills and could, without reservation, stand up to HYDRA and _live_.

That brought him to Natasha Romanoff’s broker.

That brought him to this northbound train.

* * *

The cafe car was occupied by only a handful of people and a uniformed Amtrak attendant behind the counter who offered a menu of simple, mostly pre-packaged, food. He got a bagel and a cup of coffee, trying not be horrified yet again that a serving of the stuff cost more than a nickel, and sat as close to the car’s far exit as he could.

It was habit mostly, to sit where he had most chance for escape. Romanoff, whatever she was going to do, would not send Amtrak security or even local cops in to try to subdue him. Simple futility. It also went against the usual code of these spy-for-hire negotiations. To turn on him as a potential client could have her turn on anybody, and that was a rep the Black Widow, in her independent work, could not afford.

Buck dropped his knapsack to his feet at slid the larger bag overhead. As he bit into his toasted bagel, warm cream cheese leaked over his tongue. There was some other taste missing.

 _A bearded man leaned his elbows on a worn but well-polished wooden counter, asking him if he wanted lox with the schmear. Behind the man, a hand-painted sign:_ Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army. _The letterwork…_

He set down the bagel to work the dual zippers of his pack open, reaching in one of the pockets for the blue-lined notebook that was labelled “1930 - 1943 (Army Recruitment)” and “NYC/Brooklyn” on the front with the inside cover dedicated to other major notes in history - Great Depression. Prohibition. He scrawled on another page: _Deli - Manhattan? Lox (pink fish?) on bagel - more sign painting._ The almost calligraphic hand in the signs came up again and again in the pages...blue letters on white...

 _...the smoke and the stench of frail, emaciated bodies all piled in a pit outside another factory, each with a six-pointed star sew into threadbare clothing._ Jude. _Around him, familiar companions swearing in horror. Too late...Steve was the angriest of all._

“Sir?”

The voice startled him. He nearly drew for his concealed knife, but his gloved hand clutched the narrow table instead. The pen had frozen mid-word on the page. The bagel had been fully devoured.

“Sir, you alright?” It was a young woman in her late teens, probably a college student, sitting at another table not to far away, spooning at her yogurt like it was the last thing she wanted to eat. “My aunt...she came back from Afghanistan, like a month ago. Stayin’ with us for a bit and she-- Well, she does what you…Sorry. I didn’t mean-- ” The kid seem embarrassed and wiggled her earbuds back in, returning to glancing down at the cellphone she was checking, as if she had never even raised her voice.

Barnes realized he was staring a hole right into her. She had tried to help him, and the Soldier was now evaluating her for her threat-factor. God, he was a mess. Humanity, manners, kindness...all gone. 

He looked at his watch. Shit. 

Romanoff was due any minute. He should...what?...get her a coffee? He didn’t have the faintest clue how...if...

One Miss Samantha Lamar was pushing her way through the narrow glass and steel door, her large designer purse hooked over her left shoulder. There was no use in pretending they were strangers; too many empty seats and tables.

He quickly shoved his notebook away, tugging his backpack further under the table. 

She, too, quietly sized up the occupants in the railcar before she slid into the vinyl seat across from him.

Natasha pulled something from her purse and set it on the table nearby his coffee cup. It looked like a compact, the kind that women used to powder themselves, then and now.

The low, ambient rush of the air around their transport and the drone of the engine pulling them along masked her hushed voice. “This device, once activated -- and it _is_ activated -- jams every com and wireless signal in the spectrum within a twelve foot radius,” she began as a preamble. “It will stay on until we are finished with this conversation.”

Buck nodded slowly. He could almost feel the cool control waft off of her. He couldn’t look at her face for long and chose to gaze at the the rapidly passing corridor of upstate greenery outside the window instead.

“If we are going to have a deal, there are a few conditions,” the Black Widow continued. “Firstly, you are to leave this train with me when I do, whenever and wherever. Secondly, you will remain in my close company and stay within the range of this device until I decide it is unnecessary.”

He tried to take in the ramifications. On first blush it seemed she had absolutely no confidence in the arrangement. 

“Where are we going, then?” He tried to be just as suspicious.

“You’re not going to know till we get there,” Natasha returned.

“And that’s where you’ll have that Green-Troll-guy and that Space-Norse-guy take me into custody, right? When we’re away from civilians?” The names of her associates escaped him just then like so much did, running through his brain like water through a clenched metal hand. 

He decided that he needed to look her in eye for the answer, even if she was a grandmaster at masking her tells.

Buck watched her full lips tighten. It was like glancing across a game table, trying to bluff his own strong hand.

“Your condition was that I don’t tell anyone about this. So I haven’t. That I give you lead-time? Seventy-two hours good? Fine. I need the money and we could all use the intel, so…” She shrugged, reaching again into that monstrosity of handbag for...lipstick? Natasha applied it slowly as a passenger walked past them, using the mirror in the compact.

This was not how he had envisioned it going down. Buck thought he’d simply hand over the drives, make arrangements for a future exchange of files and money in some mutually-agreed upon location when she was through with the deencryptions, and hop off at the next stop.

But with this...she was changing things up in ways that could not be predicted. The Soldier understood what she doing and admired her for it: isolating him from any backup _or_ any behind-the-scenes handler. It was protecting herself, mostly, from a set-up; it was also giving him an opportunity, if he was being monitored and coerced, to fess up and escape with her alone somewhere.

Steve, he reminded himself, trusted Romanoff with his life. She had Cap’s back now where Barnes once stood, a lifetime ago. Even if her presence made him all kinds of uncomfortable, Buck-Zach-Whoever was prompted to go _all in._

“Then I guess we have an arrangement,” he finally concluded. 

“Great,” she agreed, taking back the compact and slipping it into the purse.

The unexpected rush of relief at settling upon terms flooded his bloodstream. Romanoff had taken control. All he needed to do was follow her and her directions. Not fight her again. Not fight _anything._ For just a little while.

“Hey!” These words of hers were rather louder, snapping back his attention. He found himself with his temple pressed against the cool glass window and eyes closed, true sleep teasing at him. “Let’s move a bit closer to the counter. That coffee smells half-decent.”

“‘S’not bad,” he mumbled, straightening and rubbing his face. “Still highway robbery.”

Through his blinking lashes, Natasha-Samantha didn’t quite manage to mask her smile behind a scoff. “Rogers thought that, too.”

Well enough, he decided. This could be much better than being at each other’s throats the entire trip. Wherever she was taking him.


	3. Natasha

The paper coffee cup in her manicured hand, Natasha suggested that she and Barnes go back to their assigned seats again in rear of the train. He drifted just behind her after picking up his satchels again; he was stone quiet and, well, just a bit brooding. Men and women that casually glanced at her treading down the aisle quickly tore their eyes away when he came into better focus.

In a gap between cars, she just about hissed at him to turn down the intensity, if he could manage.

He declared, “I gotta...um...use the facilities. How’s that gonna work?”

“I’ll stay just outside,” she countered as they passed the second door. The enclosed stall, hardly larger than those on airplanes, was unoccupied at the end of the car.

He left his bags with her, and Natasha waited for her companion to relieve himself while casually checking her StarkPhone. The cell signal was down as well as the complimentary wireless, thanks to her device, to which her Samantha-self rolled her eyes and made some remark to another passenger about the crappy signal in Coach.

When her companion stepped out after all the usual noises, she realized that he had run a damp comb through his hair, slicking the locks back behind his ears. Was it too much to hope on Cap’s behalf that it was Bucky’s bit of vanity, coming to the surface at last?

Again, she thought how horribly unfair this was to Steve. Yet Barnes, for all his struggles, was a grown man, and (assuming that she wasn’t being played), free of will. He had to be allowed to make his own choices, become who he wanted to be after decades, without HYDRA _or_ Rogers dictating that.

Or even herself, Natasha thought forlornly, as the dark-haired man motioned with this head to the unlocked lavatory and inquired: “You?”

“No,” she uttered in response, making their way to their seats. “I’m good for now.”

When they settled in, Natasha pulled out a glamour magazine from what seemed like her bottomless purse, asking plainly but lowly. “So what do you like to be called?”

“Zach. Zach Sheridan,” he responded, shoving his hands in his hoodie again, understanding what she was getting at. “Card carrying and everything.”

She liked the ring to the alias. It wasn’t too different from his true name. “Short for Zachary?” How many times had she been Natalie Rushman?

“Only my pop called me that,” he returned, slumping a little in the seat. “When he was mad.” He didn’t take out anything from his bag to occupy him.

“Well, Zach. Would you like to borrow ‘The Vampire Affair’ or switch with me so you can look out the window?” The swaths of summer green and shadow continued to pass them by at speed, with an occasional peek down to the Hudson River from the tracks.

“Window’d be nice,” he opted finally, standing back in the aisle rather than them awkwardly switch over one another’s legs.

Within minutes of their new positions, Barnes was _gone_ , his eyes unblinking as in glassy irises mirrored the waves of brush and the leaf-fractured daylight, except for when another passenger would move significantly enough in the car to draw him back just enough to assess present dangers. Natasha didn’t think he was aware of how his right hand slipped from its pocket to ghost-write figures on his jean’s-covered knee, words or doodles she could not discern, and she doubted he would remember.

 _I’ve got this watch, James Buchanan,_ she wanted to tell him, but couldn’t, else her voice would betray her. So she continued to read her magazine and hum notes of a Simon  & Garfunkel song just under her breath, remembering Clint introduced Rogers to it ironically after he joined S.H.I.E.L.D..

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, which is what I do when I want to gain some momentum on a fic. Welcome back, readers!


	4. Bucky

_Male voices of different registers bantering in the tight, lurching spaces of the sleeper car, berths stacked up on one another. The scent of cigarette smoke and sweat. Drab green everywhere. He was headed away from endless Midwest hills and training fields back to the grit and chrome and concrete and lights of the City on these rails. He had only twenty-four hours to say goodbye to his folks and sisters, to have one last hurrah..._

_”I’m thinkin’ a double date, darlin’. It’s my last night….C’mon.You know he’s my best pal…. What about your blonde friend from the maternity ward? Beatrice? Bonnie! Yeah, her....She’s looking to settle down, right?”_

That old Bucky Barnes was resourceful. That old Bucky Barnes made the best of everything...

When the train of this hour slowed to pull into a quaint upstate New York station, the man that still had right to Bucky Barnes’ name realized he had lost another chunk of time. But the memories before the War were more than pleasant to stumble on in the turmoil that was his mind.

That past was seductive, he knew, the kind he could lose himself in.

Daydreaming could get him killed, he reminded himself with a frown, recalling that Black Widow was inches from him. She was only his ally for the cash and perhaps some loyalty to Rogers, which a dull shame poked at him.

There was a pen in her hand, scratching off some sort of self-quiz on the glossy pages of her reading. He wondered if she was doing that sort of thing as Romanoff or her alias, and guessed it would be Samantha.

As the conductor announced the upcoming station, she tucked everything away. “Let’s stretch our legs.”

Buck frowned, wonder where she was leading them next. They were pretty much tied at the hip by their arrangement, and so he collected his own bags and rose with her while most other people kept their seats. Through glimpses of other passengers’ windows, the station was quaint and red brick and probably built around the time he had been born. 1917, he reminded himself. The 10th of March, 1917.

Through the open door that wafted early-summer warmth, Natasha stepped out of the open portal, sliding on her large-lensed sunglasses as she did so.

He wanted to pause and grab for his hat, but she continued down the platform towards the station as a few passengers began boarding the railcar.

“Do you have a cell phone on you?” she inquired, just as he met her stride.

“Maybe.” He wasn’t about to tell her that he had switched one burner for another in New York City before stepping aboard. That one was waiting for him in a place in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, buried in a freezer bag underneath a rock and a yucca plant. 

“You’re getting rid of it here,” she insisted. “Dump it. Now.”

“How?” he challenged, beginning to scan the platform for options.

Romanoff shifted her heavy purse from her shoulder to her hand. “Dealers’ choice. But do it soon.”

Buck felt his jaw clench. “I didn’t agree to this,” he said her to under his breath. It felt like a test.

The Widow paused, turning towards him. “Give me something to trust.” 

“And how do you know I don’t have a second or third?” he questioned, dropping his backpack to the ground to finally get his ballcap. He fingered the cheap flip phone in his jean’s pocket, palming it in his gloved left.

“We’ll deal with it soon enough. Just...just do it,” she demanded as the station gave its last call for boarding.

Buck glanced around, seeing a couple with a monstrosity of a stroller who just disembarked the train, half-distracted by yet another of their young brood that was having some sort of tantrum.

Fine, he thought. He’d play it Romanoff’s way, with her own methods.

He shouldered his bags and walked purposefully towards them, forcing his companion to follow. “Excuse me?” The mother swept the fussy toddler in her arms as Buck turned his attention to the father. “This is the train to Albany, right?”

The man nodded, and Buck landed his eyes on the two identical babies in the double-wide stroller, kneeling as if for a closer look. “Oh, wow! Aren’t they cute...c’mere, honey, you have to see them!”

Natasha just look annoyed and a bit apologetic to the parents. “We’re going to miss our train, Zach,” she said, crossing her arms.

“But...twins!” Just like Barnes’ two baby sisters after Rebecca, he knew vaguely. He felt the corners of his lips tug into a genuine, flashing smile even as he leaned closer to the two infant faces and surreptitiously slipped the cellphone into one of the multiple storage pockets on the stroller.

Romanoff just sighed and rolled her eyes as he continued beaming. He snagged his bags once again from the platform, rising to full height.

“I hope you guys have a _great_ vacation,” he said, feeling curious that he meant it. Buck then stepped back on the train, all the while feeling Natasha’s eyes bore into him.

In German this time, as they retook their seats. “What the fuck?!” she hissed. “You plant it with a bunch of kids?!”

Bucky sighed, feeling agitated by her. “Look, lady. You told me to get rid of it. I did. If you think HYDRA is going to stake out their bed-and-breakfast in the middle of the night looking for me -- which they aren’t-- well. That’s on _you_.”

He turned his squared shoulders from her and went back to gazing out the window, glad she hadn’t decided to take the argument further. Trust? The Soldier wasn’t anything that could be trusted with the safety of others; maybe she’d see that a little bit now when she made her last-moment demands.

He couldn’t be good; he had just demonstrated that. He only needed the world to finally leave him alone.


	5. Natasha

As their train continued northward, Natasha felt her frustration at Bucky’s choice of plants ease. It had been an overabundance of caution, yes, to have him ditch his cellphone to give a false trail to anyone tracking him. Her demand certainly had him just as peeved.

His brief pretense that she and he were a couple to strangers felt like a punch squarely to her gut. Topsy-turvy. Inside-out of so long ago when it was not affection but indifference feigned between them. 

She began second-guessing herself. They could revisit their deal, make other arrangements for the decrypted files, and part ways at the end of the line.

Steve wanted the man he regarded as his brother back. His Bucky.

Natalia ached for her lover, that often-reckless and fiercely passionate and vulnerable man under the Winter Soldier.

But the Barnes seated next to her was neither of them.

What James needed most was a friend.

Natasha sighed slowly as the last stop was announced. She’d do her best.

* * *

As the train slowed to pull into the terminal station, Natasha took out a silk scarf and using the slight reflection of the window not occupied by Barnes’ silhouette to aid her in tying it over her brown wig. It wasn’t as good for obscuring her identity as a baseball cap, but with her new set of plans, it would have to do.

He stared at her ghost of an image in the glass before smoothing back his own hair to don his cap. 

“What next?” he asked her quietly.

“I was thinking lunch,” she responded, checking the time on her still semi-disabled cellphone. 

“Okay,” Bucky responded, as if understanding that he would be given more details about their next destination only when it became timely.

In the modern terminal, she walked a half-step in front of Barnes in her summer sandals, while he looked rather uncomfortably warm in his hoodie and jeans in the early afternoon sun. In short order, they departed the building and surveyed the working class neighborhood surrounding the tracks. There was sure to be a bar or a pizza joint in the area.

Natasha saw some sort of eave and signage on a two-story building a few blocks away and crossed the lightly trafficked street.

“I think that’s an Italian joint,” he noted, his eyesight incredibly sharp. It had been even before the serum, by his old Army records. She had poured over them and his SSR file secretly, again and again, trying to come to terms, fill in the gaps of decades between the life of Sergeant Barnes and the American trainer in the Red Room.

“Sounds good to me,” she said, slowing a bit on the cracked sidewalk. “He’d be happy to know you aren’t starving.”

“Food...helps,” he replied. “Mostly.”

“Trust me, if I never have to choke down an MRE again, it will be too soon,” she offered casually. “What about the Commandos? When there wasn’t even chem packs to heat--”

“Please, don’t.” Bucky’s footsteps paused, the grit of dirt under concrete.

She turned, wondering if she had pushed too far. “‘Don’t’ what?”

“Don’t fuck with me,” he deadpanned. “Don’t think that mentioning Rogers and what he and I went through together those years fighting the Red Skull is going to change _anything_. Like you suppose nostalgia makes up for all the...Like I’m falling for that.” He scowled. “I know what you are and what you do.”

It shouldn’t have stung so much, his rebuke. But it did.

“Do you?” she inquired, crossing her arms. “Really?”

A car blasting rap, the bass thumping in her chest, drove past them. Bucky followed it with his eyes, scowling at it. Finally, he glanced back at her.

“It’s why I came to you,” he countered, and then something in the phrase must have bothered him, and he scoffed. “Look. If I want to know something about Steve or back then, I’ll ask.”

“And how would you know that any answers wasn’t more of my manipulations? Fucking with you?”

He swiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead with his gloved hand, then adjusted his backpack with a shrug. He gave in. “I don’t.”

“Then I think it’s best then if we concentrate on the here-and-now? Don’t you?” That philosophy, for so many years, was her primary means of survival beyond their forced separation. The Soldier’s mindwipe of her. The bloody deeds she had done for the empty promise of his return.

“Yeah,” he agreed, walking again towards her and the restaurant. “That’s fine.”

* * *

In the single stall of the Italian place, after she had a Caprese salad and he a sausage-stuffed calzone, Natasha stripped her wig, bundled it in a plastic grocery bag, and tossed it in the bathroom trash under wads of used paper towels. More slowly, she combed her true hair out before pulling it back in a barrette. She could hear the water running in the men’s bathroom right next door.

She tried not to think of how his long fingers once coiled the crimson locks spread upon a pillow as she tied on the lavender scarf again.

Barnes was waiting in the hall. “Now what?”

She slipped on her sunglasses. “Now we have another train to catch.”

As they walked back to the station, he remarked. “You took off the wig.”

Natasha nodded once. “There’s some distance to cover. I’d rather not have to deal with the thing the entire time. I shouldn’t be recognized.”

But perhaps the Soldier had, in Odessa, somehow knew her by her red hair and spared her of a point-blank execution. For so many years, that had been her only hope that there was something left, and she kept the scar on her left hip as a testament. But in DC, under Pierce’s orders, there had been no glimmer of mercy or recognition.

They were strangers now. Little more.

In the air-conditioned and modern train station, Natasha went to an automated kiosk to print out their tickets. Barnes kept lookout, as if he was nervous in the space. With the vaulted and airy ceilings, the sniper in him was likely seeing opportunities left and right and above to be picked off or ambushed.

She tucked the tickets in her purse and then scanned around to the ubiquitous traveler essentials storefront that was in almost every commercial terminal, air or rail, she used in North America.

“We’ll need some supplies,” she said and meant it. “Snacks and things. Get a book or two to pass the time.”

The Bucky Barnes of Steve’s memory was a voracious reader. They shared a fondness of early science fiction.

Natasha grabbed a travel toothbrush kit, several varieties of health snacks, a copy of the New York Times, and a sealed deck of cards before focusing on Bucky again, who was standing in front of the ‘Bestsellers’ shelf with nothing but a single Snickers bar cradled slackly in his gloved hand. His duffle was at his feet.

A frown tugged down his mouth, and he blinked and blinked slowly at the selection of glossy hardcovers and thick paperbacks before him. Staring. Lost.

It occurred to Natasha that moment that Barnes had no idea of what he liked or once liked. That the simple pleasure of leisurely reading was yet another thing taken from HYDRA’s work. He was a stranger to himself.

She squared up the selection and then pulled something off the shelf. “How ‘bout this.” She thrust the hardback into his free hand.

“‘ _The Martian?_ ’” he read from the spine as he gave the book a once-over. “Like some alien?”

“Abandoned astronaut survives on the planet Mars. With science.” She broke her facade just a little. “You’ll like it.”

“If you say so…” 

He paid for the candy and book with cash as Natasha was still browsing.

The aging cashier was friendly. And nosy. “Where you two headed?”

There was no use obscuring from Barnes the first leg of their cross-country trip. “Chicago,” she answered quickly, approaching the register herself. “We’d fly, but I’m scared to death of crashing into an ocean or river or something and never being found...so…” God, she was being sloppy.

“Well, by train is more romantic and all,” the woman opined, smiling knowingly as she handed Natasha back her own change.

“There’s that,” Natasha returned neutrally, grabbing her purchases quickly and walking out of the store before the cashier could say something to the effect of what a nice couple she and the man with her made. 

She pointedly ignored making anything like eye contact with her companion as she exited, but heard his stalking footsteps close behind her. She waited for him to challenge her hasty departure, the cracking of her cover.

But he didn’t. Bucky only asked to her back, “How long till we board?”

“About two hours,” she noted.

“We hunker down here till then?”

She confirmed. “Yeah.” 

He had caught up to her, glancing around again at the terminal. He knew, almost as well as she, how to read postures and body language. He was even better at evaluating terrain and architecture. Yet they held in common the skill to respond to the shifting environments and adapt.

In the next few breaths, while she was inwardly shaken and considering giving this whole endeavor up for the riskier alternative that would separate them again and do away with all the awkwardness, Barnes took the lead.

So very like the confident tutor she remembered, he nodded once. “I’ll find us some decent seats.”


	6. Bucky

He and Romanoff sat back-to-back in a bank of waiting-room style chairs on the top floor of the Albany-Rensselaer train terminal. Buck liked the corner location, nearby to a doored stairwell and another route of escape twenty yards away via an outdoor veranda that hosted a number of solid metal picnic tables. He could make the three-storey jump, and Natasha probably had close-at-hand one of her grappling hooks.

Few others could follow them.

But he had studied the Black Widow’s teammates, and didn’t much like those odds.

As he stared at the floor-to-ceiling windows out at a blue sky summer day, he ran through scenarios in his head, only somewhat counting on the bargain and that Natasha wasn’t playing him. If Steve came with that blond, flying -- Viking? No, _Asgardian_ \-- fella as Buck remembered from the television news, his capture was likely. 

He could always take hostages, the Soldier within reminded. There was no-one yet in the Avengers’ roster of some super-powered being that could deflect a bullet point-blank.

He frowned. Buck didn’t know what he wanted out of this hollow of a life...but he didn’t want _that_ situation. Ever again.

“You know, you’d be a lot less noticeable if you could figure out a way to relax more while we wait,” Natasha said, not even bothering to turn from her newspaper.

She had a point.

“There funnies in that thing?” he asked gruffly. 

There was a rustling of newsprint and then a tapping on his shoulder of a bundled section. He took it, remembering too late to thank her without it seeming awkward.

As he opened it, Bucky’s eyes scanned over the squiggled lines and colored ink, none of it familiar or comforting.

_Reedy hands were pressing layers of newsprint down on a dusty floor, charcoal-darkened fingers tracing the outline of a battered, narrow leather shoe._

_In his own voice, teasing. “So which one of the hobos did ya pick this trick up from?”_

_The stacks of thin paper filled the shoe-hole where leather sole should be, only lasting for a day or two until replacement. ”Gimme a break, Buck. It’s just got to last till the WPA check comes through. This mural design I’m with...it’s amazing.”_

Determined against the odds.

Steve.

Again and again. Rogers making due with what he could scrounge.

Buck was caught with the utter need to grab one of his notebooks and write down how Captain America once had newspapers stuffed in his shoes as he stretched his pennies. But Natasha was just behind him, and could easily take out that mirrored compact of hers and spy.

Still he would risk it, before what welled up was lost again in the black depths of his mind. Buck took out a pen from his backpack and in the blank crossword spaces of the paper, and in a mix of German and spare French and English, jotted down from lower right to upper left what he caught of the memory, a hasty code only for him.

The space was quiet enough and he was focused enough to capture it. If he ever got any real time alone with his journals, he’d transcribe it better.

A small triumph.

“You actually find something funny in those funnies?” Romanoff’s voice over his shoulder.

“Wha’d’ya mean?” he returned, trying to play it cool.

“You chuckled.”

God, he had. Strange. He did his best to cover up, to pretend he was actually Zach Sheridan.

“There’s a dog,” he offered. “A talking dog in the ‘paper.”

“Well,” his companion remarked neutrally. “That’s something.”

* * *

When the call for the train coming from Boston - something called ‘Lakeshore Limited’ - was broadcast over the station’s speakers, Natasha noted, “That’s us.”

He stuffed his portions of the newspaper into his backpack before slinging it over his back as he stood. Natasha had again put on her sunglasses as they navigated their way through the terminal and down to the tracks. 

When they came to one of the cars labeled ‘Sleeping Car’, Natasha approached the attendant waiting at the base of the stairs, a middle-aged and seemingly friendly man, with both their tickets.

“Bedroom B. Have you ever taken a trip with us before?” he asked, glancing between his passengers.

“Her more than me,” Bucky volunteered. “Sam’s idea all the way.”

“Well, get settled in and when the train debarks I’ll be along to get your dinner order for this evening,” he advised. “Any other baggage?”

Natasha shook her head. “We’re travelling light.” She then took back their tickets and began climbing the metal stairs that lead into the depths of the car.

As soon as they entered the cabin through its pocket door, Buck had several impressions at once. How economical the space was, including a small waterproof room that held both toilet and shower, and how _intimate_. He and Natasha would be no more than five or six feet from each other at all times in this room, even if mirrors were positioned to make the space seem larger to the eye. He recognized what must be a bed folded away at about chin level, rather narrow.

She must have seen something in his expression as she stripped her sunglasses and tossed her purse on the wide bank of seating, just inside the door. “The couch folds down to sleep. I’ll take the top.” She opened up a small cabinet to put what was still a packaged toothbrush kit inside.

Not making eye-contact with her, he tucked his duffle in a cubby space and started stowing his backpack too, when his companion asked, “You got any singles? For tips.”

“Yeah.” He had small wads of cash in many denominations stuffed in various pockets and places, just in case he ever had to run with the clothes on his back. The quarter-million he had reserved for this agreement only weighed five pounds in his backpack and was kept in its own stuff-sack. 

“That’ll come in handy when the porter comes around. The first glass of wine’s on you,” she said, settling in on the small chair near the window, opposite the couch.

The thought came to him that he could, for the first time since who-knows-when, allow himself to get buzzed caused him pause. It would take a lot. Whatever had been done to him by HYDRA made it extremely difficult to get plastered. But with Natasha with him, he could possibly let his guard down a little, see if the taste of whiskey or beer or a cocktail brought anything back.

The pre-serum Rogers must have gotten shit-faced with a single glass, how thin he was.

_”Look at this headline: 18th Amendment Repealed. Just in time for Christmas! I’ll ask Ma to make the ‘nog extra special this year, just for you and your mom.”_

_”Buck...you’ve always had brandy at Christmas.”_

_”I know, punk...but now it hasn’t fallen off a truck…”_

“Yo, Sergeant Sheridan!”

Natasha.

He must have been staring again at nothing in-particular.

She offered him the glossy pamphlet that had been stashed in their room along with other Amtrak literature. “Figure out what you want for dinner. The attendant will ask.”

He cleared his throat and finally sat down, facing her and studying the thing. This he could do. He liked beef, that he knew. 

“What’s tilapia?”

“Fish,” she answered, pulling that pack of cards from out of her purse just as more announcements on their imminent departure came over the speakers.

“I guess I’ll stick with the ribs,” he said, watching somewhat amazed as she pulled a small compact table out of its stowage, flipping the eaves open for an even larger surface between them, as he put back the menu.

She eased back in her chair, tore off the cellophane on the deck, and extracted the set.

“Gambling, huh?” she asked, alluding to his small fortune. “What do they play in those places?”

“I’m best at seven-card, but I guess now that there is this Texas hold’em thing that’s popular,” he answered. 

“Teach me.” There was a tone in her voice. She slid the deck over towards him. It wasn’t an order...but it was firm, and there was something else about the words...

Bucky found himself biting his lips for a moment, oddly hesitant. “We don’t have any chips.”

“Will some pennies and loose change do?” 

“Well enough,” he found himself answering, fingering the virgin cards, flipping them over to extract the jokers.

He could feel the train under them begin to get into motion. He could see the station platforms all-so-slowly pass through their window when he glanced out.

And there was Natasha, across from him, gazing with her green eyes expectantly, even openly, at him. She was the Queen of Spades if ever he knew one. It was a good thing, Buck decided, that they were only playing for dimes and quarters.


	7. Natasha

She knew enough of the fundamentals of poker; one was not an international spy without being familiar with the games preferred by the powerful and wealthy. As Bucky dealt yet another hand to her and himself, with one gloved hand and one bare, he did not often look up to her, but rather focused on the the small, fold out table between them in their small private room on their westbound train, and the three face-up cards between them.

“Heads-up is more cut-throat,” he began, then realized what he said and who he was saying it to. He scoffed. But after a moment of composing himself he continued. “If your odds are looking good after the flop, raise and raise, even a little. Don’t give up the turn or the river for free.”

Natasha eyed her pocket ten of hearts and seven of diamonds in her hand, and watched as Bucky raised her a dime, nearly doubling the pot size of a few nickels.

There was something very methodical about his motions. He must have played a great deal since going on the run. It may have been one of the few things that could keep him in the present, she thought.

“I fold,” she stated, not liking her chances, tossing them face down over the cards Bucky had discarded in the deal.

“Let me see,” he said, taking them up, and flipping them over.

“You said never to show your hand when you fold,” she noted.

“I did. This is learning.” Then from the table, he turned over his own cards and set them side-by-side. A pair of nines. “With those, I had about a fifty-fifty chance, even before--”

There was a knock at the curtained sliding door.

Bucky stiffened and shoved his left hand in the pocket of his hoody, eyeing the entrance while Natasha rose from her chair, pulled back the curtain for her peek.

As she expected, it was the porter with a clipboard in hand. She unlocked the door, sliding it aside.

“Good afternoon,” the uniformed man greeted. “Settling in?”

“Just fine,” Natasha offered with a small smile, looking over her shoulder at her companion, who was tapping absently on the table with his right fingertips while looking out the window at the upstate New York scenery.

“We have coffee, tea, and juice if you’d like, miss. The cafe car has more if you’d prefer something before dinner.” He then raised his clipboard. “When would you like to be seated in the dining car?” The attendant must have read something in Bucky’s body language that made him offer something else. “Of course, we can certain make arrangements for a private dinner in your room.”

Natasha was ready to request the food be brought to them when her companion shifted and rose from his seat. He reached into his back pocket.

Bucky chimed up, even though there was a serious, almost gravelly tenor in his voice. “What’s the latest seating? For the dining car reservations?”

“Eight o’clock, sir.” The porter already had out his pen.

Barnes pressed up behind her in the small space, extending that hand with what was a folded one-hundred dollar bill, clasped neatly between his index and middle finger like a cigarette. He slid the Benjamin neatly just under the reservation cards the man was about to fill out.

His gloved hand, she realized with a small ache, was resting mostly obscured on her left hip, so very lightly despite the solidness of his metal arm. Samantha continued to smile politely.

“Can you make it a private table at that time?” he asked. “In the back.”

“Yes, certainly!”

With a wide grin the porter scratched out their time and table, and offered it back to Bucky in exchange.

“And if we could get a cola with ice, a Coke? And a glass of white wine delivered when possible, I’d be doubly appreciative,” Barnes offered just over her shoulder.

“Right away, sir!” The porter shortly disappeared, closing their compartment door behind them.

Bucky immediately withdrew his hand, sinking heavily down into the couch he had occupied since they boarded.

Natasha didn’t know whether to be annoyed or charmed; that subtle mix that was more heady than any beverage the porter had to offer.

“A little over-the-top,” she remarked.

He simply took up the deck of cards again, reshuffling them. “There were girls -- not girls. Sorry. -- _Hostesses._ They work mostly for tips around the table. Give you a shoulder massage for like a hundred for fifteen minutes.” He set the cards down, waiting for her to take her seat, and make the cut. “That there with him was cheap.”

“Hmm,” Natasha remarked, doing her best to seem uncommitted as she settled in again. “Zach ever take advantage of those hostesses?”

“Couldn’t.” He again was more concentrated on the cards than on her. It was probably for the best. “Can’t.”

Can’t what? She wanted to ask. Can’t be touched? That’d there would be talk of a man with some weird metal arm in the underground rooms he played in?

“I still tipped at the end...for the drinks.”

Natasha sighed. She was losing perspective in a subtle fight against her skin’s memory. The ploy of seeming like some sort of lovers to all these bystanders was beginning to erode her. Maybe it was just what HYDRA wanted.

He passed the improvised dealer’s button over to her, a Canadian dime he had found in his pocket change. “Your deal, Romanoff.”

Fifteen minutes later, their attendant delivered a real wine glass with a single serve bottle and a unopened can of soda for him, with the ice on the side.

Before she took the first sip, she evaluated her options. They had a number of hours before their appointment in the dining car. “When one of us comes out on top in this game, we’re going to deal with the jamming thing.” As much as Stark-generated technology was incredibly efficient, her compact device wouldn’t run forever without a recharge.

“Suit yourself,” Bucky replied neutrally, tossing another dime into the pot as he met her raise.

* * *

By the end of a few hours, when he switched from giving her tips and hints on the cards to honestly playing with her, Natasha had lost three bucks in change to Barnes. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the quarter-million he was promising. 

They didn’t speak much beyond that which concerned the game. Whatever persona he held at the table, he wasn’t a man that distracted from the hand with banter or small-talk. There was only a sharp intelligence in his eyes as he looked at his two hole cards once before that keen, steel-eyed gaze observed the cards revealed. First three, then one, then the last.

Playing this, Barnes just _was_ , with none of the Winter Soldier’s cold or the warmth she had found once-upon-a-time. 

As Natasha polished off her wine, she entertained the guilty notion that if it hadn’t been for her mistakes, her recklessness when she was younger, more of the Bucky from Steve’s past would have survived. In their rebellion, his handlers must have assured rusted impulses became entirely dismantled.

“You’re second guessing yourself.”

Natasha frowned, feeling the air stick in her throat. “What?”

“You’re second guessing yourself. You should continue with your raises if you’re bluffing for the jack three-of-a-kind,” Bucky explained.

Natasha scoffed. “You’re too good at this,” she said as she folded.

“It’s about the only thing that I _am_ good at, other than...than what…” He didn’t need to finish. She saw the guilt in his features.

She wanted to tell him that he was good at so many other things. That he could dance like a old-fashioned Hollywood lead, that he could send a woman to the moon and back again with his hands and mouth. But how could she when he recalled nothing? He had nothing to believe her, nothing to grasp or examine or hold onto.

That couldn’t be helped. Best to get on with the mission.

“Lay your hands on the table and do not move them until I say,” she ordered, reaching for her purse.

Bucky wasn’t a fool. He asked as he complied, “So this is it? When you’re going to search me for those bugs and tracking devices?”

“You would. If you were me.” Natasha was careful to keep Barnes in her line of vision as she pulled out what looked to be a designer fountain pen and then the compact. “Is there anything you want to tell me about what may be on your person or in your belongings before we start?”

“You know about the pistol,” he began, not even bothering to phrase it as a question.

“I assumed. You probably have knives, too. It’s not so much those as anything that transmits.”

He shook his head slowly. “The cellphone’s gone. No laptops. Certainly no surveillance devices.”

She motioned with her chin as she twisted the cap of the pen a certain way. “And your arm?”

“Check for yourself, I guess. I can’t convince you otherwise,” he said glumly, gazing at her with suddenly tired eyes. “You’re too smart for that, Natasha.”

Bucky hadn’t used her name often. It’s was if he believed he didn’t have a right to it.

She marched on by snatching up the compact, she traced the access symbol with her finger and then set it back on the table. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be able to get a clear read with the thing on.

“Hold out your left arm, only.”

Using the pen like a wand, she passed over his appendage with the instrument that looked for active transmissions in a broad spectrum of frequencies, waiting for it to vibrate should it come close to a source. She did it three times, over his shoulder, around his chest, down to his still-gloved fingertips. Nothing.

She also did it with his right hand.

“Now put your hands up around the back of your neck, and lay down on your stomach on the couch.”

Natasha thought about having her own pistol handy while she did this, just in case the ruse was up and she found something compromising. She saw how a sheen of sweat started on his upper lip and forehead, and she realized this sort of ‘examination’ was unnerving him.

Was it because he _was_ hiding something or because she was treating him so clinically? Like the white-coated technicians did. 

God, this was a mess.

Natasha did one of the only things she could do. She began to chat to a fellow human and not an piece of machinery undergoing inspection. “Most of my safehouses are dumps. Little out of the way, rundown places that no one looks to closely in some twenty-storey tenement...You know the kind...But I had this one in Vietnam. Down a crazy muddy dirt road. But when you got there, there was this shack next to the beach. Water and sky, the sound of the sea. You can turn over, now.”

As Barnes shifted and looked up at her, he didn’t seem so tense anymore. She began describing the sunrises there as she continued to pass her hand and the gizmo over him.

“You like the beach, then?” he finally asked her, eyes half-lidded, seemingly trying to get the hang of this sort of small-talk.

“Not as much as other places.” She stood up over him, crossing her arms. “You’ll find out soon enough. But, right now? Your bags.”

He immediately frowned. Despite her directions, he sat up, both hands clenched near his thighs. “I have...things. Things I don’t want you--”

“I’m not the TSA,” she half-joked. “Keep your more than three-fluid ounces of Jim Beam for all I care.” Barnes did not seem in the mood to be teased in such a manner.

Natasha gave out a long sigh. “Will you trust me not to open them? Just turn them over a few times?” This was a small torture to him, and what she was feigning as exasperation was actually a bit of her breaking down too. “Please?” The Black Widow didn’t often use the word ‘please’.

“Okay,” he whispered, his eyes following her every movement even as the rest of him was frozen.

It was reckless to turn her back on him to reach for his duffelbag in the storage above the door, but she didn’t want him to see her face for that moment when she shut her eyes and allowed herself three blinks worth of emotion -- the kind that contorted one’s mouth -- to surface.

The device wouldn’t be accurate through all the layers of things that he had piled in one another. He could have something in a case. She could very well miss something. She was betting her life on him telling the truth, but Barnes didn’t need to know that. 

Pretend. That is what she had spent most of her life doing. Pretend and watch for her mark to give himself away somehow. In the absence of the sensor, her instincts would have to do.

“Jesus,” she said as she strained to hoist the bags back down to the floor. “What’s in these things? Oh, yeah. Sorry. _Private_ stuff,” she needled him, as if she was more peeved than concerned.

Under Bucky’s watch, she set the backpack on the coach seat and waved the pen uselessly over the black canvas material, turning it around and doing the same thing over the front pockets. She passed the pack then to him and he placed it between his legs protectively.

When she was done with the duffel, she placed back in its stowage.

“So now will you believe I’m not working for HYDRA?” he inquired as she turned back around. He was picking up their abandoned game of poker and putting the cards back in their box.

She smirked. “Congratulations, Barnes. You’re free to roam about the train.”

He nodded, slowly. “I want to take a shower, then. There’s a shower-room in the back of the car, right?”

“It’s better if you use the private one here, don’t you think?” she countered.

He was trying to be a gentleman. Maybe get some distance from his demanding pill of a travel-mate. Maybe scrub the sensation of being scrutinized from his skin. Even if it was all at the expense of being seen by more curious eyes.

Before he could answer, she swooped up her purse. “I’m taking a good long stretch of my legs,” she spoke. “Maybe have another glass or two at the lounge. Anyway, take your time.” She reached and tugged at the curtain over their window to the outside world beyond, giving Bucky more privacy as he undressed. “I’ll knock Shave-And-A-Haircut when I’m back.”

It was for the best, Natasha thought as she slid open the door to their room, that she not be only feet from Barnes when he came out of the shower in little but a towel and his underwear, smelling the scent of soap on him and witnessing once again how drops of water tended to collect like dew onto the fingertips of his silvery hand.


	8. Bucky

A moment after Natasha closed their compartment door behind her, headed to the front of the moving train, Bucky flicked the lock and threw himself down on the long couch with a relieved sigh, bowing his head.

His elbows were on his knees, his hands raked on both sides through his hair. His stomach began to unclench.

Romanoff had to do what she had to do to assure herself that he wasn’t a HYDRA mole. He got that. But to obey her commands…

_No witnesses, Soldat._

_You must be examined, Soldat. You are to do everything the doctor says._

_Your hair must be trimmed, Soldat._

_You will shave for your mission, Soldat._

...had taken him back to the first and second ring of his own private hell.

Natasha had sensed his unease -- in her line of work, how could she _not_. She bantered. She joked. Maybe it had helped in its way. It was so hard to tell. Everything about her was so hard to tell.

Bucky had choices now. That was starting to become his mantra, again and again. He could choose.

Showers helped his head, he learned. The hotter, the better. So he chose to take the fucking shower.

It was a good thing that he wasn’t claustrophobic, sealed up in the white fiberglass box of their deluxe suite with water pouring over him. The stream from the showerhead was disappointing in its force. Still, considering that he was taking a shower at all on a train going about a hundred kilometers an hour, it was one of those small modern-miracles that would routinely catch him in an odd fascination. 

That Mars science-fiction book that Romanoff insist he start was supposed to be set even further in the future than the now he had awakened into. She said he’d like it. Maybe he would. Train travel felt a little like ocean travel. Maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched to think it a bit like space travel, too. Tight spaces, fast speeds. Only the chance of him drowning or suffocating was significantly less in this metal tube than in the others.

He ran his soapy right hand over the rills and plating of his left arm, sensing the feedback of the touch as pressure, wondering yet again, maybe the thousandth time, at the arrogance of scientists.

Scientists had made Steve Rogers into one of history’s heroes.

Scientists had made him into quite something else entire.

Toweling off the interior of the enclosed shower-toilet and then himself, he cracked open the small door to find their berth empty but for himself. It seemed Natasha had been serious when giving him some time alone.

The train’s hum and sway along the track filled the air where she wasn’t, its own kind of disquiet.

Frowning, he took down his duffel for a change in clothes. Being naked always presented a risk for his bionic arm to be seen, and he was used to dressing quickly. So he pulled on a heather-grey, long-sleeved t-shirt and a fresh pair of underwear. With his used undergarments, he bundled them up in a stuff-sack, ready for the next laundromat he came across.

In the choice between a few styles of jeans or cargo pants, he opted for the black denim. He had several pairs of unlined thin tanish-gloves he used to cover his hands, and he slipped one on his left.

Buck tried to recall when his last dinner-date would have been, likely in the mid-1940’s, and came up with nothing. He thought again about his insistence of having the meal with Romanoff in the dining car rather than in their room as her laced his boots, wondering if it was a foolish whim justified as being good for their cover.

Would he even remember his table manners?

“A goddamn idiot,” he muttered to himself, or at least to the few shards of him that would rest a hand on a lady’s waist and invite her in a way that was impolite to refuse to a table he had reserved just for the two of them. As if it would get him anything. As if it could go anywhere…

He decided to pack away his pistol along with his hooded jacket, knowing that he’d look less like a vagrant if he tucked in his shirt and combed back his hair.

Alone for a while more, he could at least do _something_ he couldn’t do in Natasha’s presence. 

Turning on one of the reading lights overhead to the couch rather than slide back the window curtains, Buck extracted from his backpack one of his notebooks and the section of newspaper with his encoded scribbles, taking the faint clues of memory and putting them down in as much coherency as he could with a mechanical pencil.

He had a page for each one of his sisters. Rebecca first and then the twins, which he remembered little of but had been re-discovered when he had gone on some genealogical website in a public library during one of his attempts to track down HYDRA. There were some of his father’s war records there from the preceding world conflict that came at his birth, but there was little of Barnes’ own military history to recover.

Buck suspected that the papers had been sealed long ago when he volunteered to join the S.S.R.. He suspected it was that gorgeous brunette -- Agent Peggy Carter, right? Yes. -- that had seen to that. At the Smithsonian, he had witnessed the footage of her some years later. She and Steve were sweethearts, he was almost certain. She was probably six-feet underground by now, like the rest of the Howling Commandos.

He could ask Natasha about Carter. He could ask her a great deal about Rogers. She’d give him as many answers as he asked and more. Probably much, much more in an attempt to reunite him with his estranged best-friend from another era. It was impossible for Steve to know all the terrible things Bucky had done for HYDRA...

There was a knock on the suite door in a rhythm different from the one Natasha promised. Buck quickly shoved the notebook into his backpack and rose to check behind the door’s curtain with his left.

It was the porter.

He unlatched the lock and tried not to stare daggers into the man.

“While you are at dinner tonight, would you like me to set up a bed or beds for you?” the attendant asked politely, leaving Zach Sheridan the open of whether he and his companion intended to sleep side-by-side on the lower.

He blinked, considering. “Both berths, please. I tend to toss and turn.”

There, Buck thought. He had threaded the needle.

“Very well, sir. They’ll be ready when you return.”

Not that he intended to sleep.

* * *

Before Natasha had returned from her excursion forward in the train, Bucky had unshaded their window and cracked open _The Martian._

At taking in the first chapter, he thought Natasha was purposefully trying to unsettle him. A man on a mission is presumed dead and left by his fellows. Where did _that_ sound familiar? But then Mark Watney’s journals took a turn into him solving the issues of survival on the alien landscape, Buck was more intrigued than unsettled.

Romanoff must have known a great deal about James Buchanan Barnes from Steve. 

_’An excellent athlete who also excelled in the classroom…’_ said the memorial wall to Roger’s fallen friend.

Was his nose in a book as often as his feet were on the track and field?

_He sat on a plank bench as crackle of gunfire continued along a long expanse of grass. Targets, not men, were far in the distance. The day was sunny. The early spring breeze was somehow warm on his face._

_A sharp-eyed man in his middle age, with his hat literally in one hand, sat next to him. He shook his head and smoked a cigarette with his other. “Sorry to have to break the news to you, son. But the Committee’s decided not to field a rifle team for Berlin. Don’t you worry, though. Next Game’s gonna be our year. Tokyo.” He whistled. “Imagine them geisha girls...”_

A tap-tap-tap rap-pap. Tap. Tap.

Buck realized that his eyes had scanned over page 43 of the novel at least five times.

He set the book aside and let Natasha in. The only sign that she had tied a few on in the bar-car was a small flush to her cheeks. 

“The porter came by,“ he shared, taking a step backwards. “Our beds will be set when we get back.”

“And me without my pajamas,” she quipped before tossing herself and her purse on the couch and slipping off her flats with a quick and practiced motion of her toes. Her eyes became half-lidded as she rested her bare feet up.

“Oh...you didn’t bring…?” Of course she hadn’t. She had expected to be back in Manhattan by now, likely having dinner prepared by Stark Junior’s personal chef and staff.

Natasha shrugged, her lips thinning briefly as she glanced beyond him out the window. “Meant to get an extra-large t-shirt at the gift shop in Albany. Oops.” She sounded so nonchalant about her oversight, Buck didn’t have any idea what to make of it.

Maybe she liked sleeping in the buff.

The train gave one of its occasional lurches.

“You can borrow something of mine,” he immediately offered, taking the two steps to retrieve his duffelbag.

“Afraid of being scandalized, Barnes? Those old geezer sensibilities coming back?” She was quite definitely jabbing at him now, her eyes dancing in barely-hidden amusement.

He didn’t take the bait as he dug out a navy t-shirt, still within its original packaging. There were times he just bought the things by the half-dozen and stuffed them in a curbside donation bin after a few wears, not bothering with laundering them. “Here.” He tossed it lightly at her with a flick of his wrist and zipped his bag up quickly to signal there would be no argument.

“Thanks,” she replied gruffly, taking out her paperback from her purse.

He shrugged, unwilling to leave her teasing uncontested. “I’ll take it out of the quarter-mil coming to you. Now it’s just two hundred and forty-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-three dollars and seventy cents. Us old-timers are thrifty and count every penny, right?”

Romanoff scoffed and opened her book with a single splayed hand. The packaged shirt she just wedged between the seat cushion and the wall of their compartment.

Bucky returned to his own reading, sitting down in the chair she had occupied during their poker game. He began again at page 43.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back in the saddle after taking a break for the Buckynat Smutathon. Thanks for your patience, readers!


	9. Natasha

Giving Barnes a few hours by himself, Natasha made good on her plan to go to the lounge car. She traded her wine for a double whiskey on the rocks, knowing that this would probably put her just on the edge of having her reflexes and awareness compromised. But everything about this...this situation...had the potential to compromise her.

She went to an empty table, realizing someone had left a tabloid magazine on the bench seat. She set it front of her, wondering if the owner would be back for it or not.

She’d have to figure out how to look Steve in the eye again, when she saw him back at the Tower. It would be easier with a hard-drive’s worth of decrypted HYDRA files to give to the Avengers’ efforts. She’d have to make up something about her source, but they were all used to Natasha being slippery about that.

She had a reputation to maintain. Even Barnes had bought into it.

The train began to slow as some tiny stop in western New York was announced. Natasha thought to the homeyness of the Barton homestead, of where she wasn’t the Black Widow. There, she was only Aunty Natasha, and she could witness a girl grow up as children should and not as she herself had been brought up in the Academy; where the only happiness Natasha understood for nearly all of her life was being faster, stronger, and smarter than the other recruits in her cohort.

The Soldier had changed all that. The man behind the Soldier had changed her.

Natasha tossed back another deep swallow of her drink, knowing that she’d have to slow down soon.

She started flipping through the rag on the table, scanning past celeb paparazi shots and the usual scandals until she came to a spread: _’All Bets are On - Which Avenger Will Marry First?’_

She tugged at the edges of her headscarf, doing her best to obscure the profile.

She skimmed the first paragraph: _‘Bookkeepers from around the globe are taking bets which one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes will tie the knot soon….Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts and Tony Stark have weathered ups-and-downs together, so the odds are favoring them for now. But is trouble on the horizon for this power-couple?...A second favorite in the stakes are Thor and his physicist-paramour, Jane Foster. What girl doesn’t dream of marrying a prince?..._ ’

Natasha just rolled her eyes at that one. She found her own name near the bottom of the piece. _‘And what about Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow herself? While their private Christmas Eve skating session at Rockefeller Center last year sparked speculation that something more-than-collegial was between her and Steve Rogers, the Captain seems more interested in cutting the heads off HYDRA than of pursuing romance with the only female Avenger. Given that Clint "Hawkeye" Barton has had his Cupid's arrow set on her for quite some time, could this be a love-triangle in the making?’_

She scoffed and tossed the magazine aside. At least the writers had stopped short of man-eater and spider metaphors. She’d wished she could set everyone straight that there wasn’t something between her and Rogers; there was _someone._ He was four rail-cars behind and probably toweling off from his shower.

The crunch of ice cubes in her teeth only helped slightly with her frustration.

Breathe, she told herself. Breathe and think about something else.

She reached for her cellphone and checked the signal. Decent enough. She made her call.

“Hello? Mary? Yes, this is Sasha Manorly.”

The woman on the other end of the line paused to turn what sounded like her TV down. _“I was just getting ready to call you. Didn’t get that money order from you this month.”_

Natasha knew it was because her funds were drying up, and Isaiah was playing hot-potato with her bills. But Mary Red-Calf didn’t know that.

“Thought I’d hand you the cash in person. Decided to get out west for a while with some company, and wanted to be sure the Jeep was ready.”

_”Jackie--”_ That was her son. _“--turned it over last week. Did the oil change and anti-freeze a couple of months back, too.”_

“Great. We should be there tomorrow evening, give or take a few hours...you know how the train is.”

_”I’ll be home. Jackie can pick you up once you ring. You're welcome to supper with us.”_

"Thanks." Natasha felt the train begin to get underway again. “How’s your granddaughter?”

 _”Annie’s in Seattle right now with her mother, seeing the specialist. They’re adjusting her medications.'_ The woman on the other end sounded tired.

“I hope all goes well for her.” Natasha meant it.

 _”We’ll see you soon, Sasha.”_ Mary disconnected the call.

There was nothing left but dregs of the whiskey left, slowly diluted by ice cubes. Natasha checked the phone’s time and figured she’d give Barnes another twenty minutes of privacy.

She wondered what was in his belonging he was so hell-bent on protecting. Copies of _Hustler?_ Some alien tech he had found while raiding HYDRA? Completely a guess. She sure-as-hell hoped that it wasn’t what she feared: a tracking device. Well, once at their stop, she’d have more options to take care of that possibility.

Taking a pencil and notepad from her purse, Natasha began to write a very mundane list that started with ‘Milk’ and ‘Eggs’ and ‘Bread’. It had been months since her last visit to her hideaway, and she and James would need groceries.

* * *

When she returned to their private compartment, she found him showered and dressed in a soft looking long-sleeved shirt and black pants, his dark-brown hair almost dry. It must have been the fanciest clothes he owned.

Barnes had actually cracked open the book she insisted he buy back in Albany.

When he mentioned their sleeping arrangements, Natasha realized that she had made a terrible oversight back in the store in the Albany-Rensselaer train station, when that gossipy cashier called their journey ‘romantic’. While she had an extra change of panties in her shoulder bag, she had failed to pick up a t-shirt to sleep in.

There were only a few ways to go about it: admitting she had fucked up (because her head wasn’t on straight when it came to him) _or_ pretending not to give a fuck. As the Black Widow, she did the former.

When Barnes offered, “You can borrow something of mine,” she realized how much the liquor was in her veins, of how torturously sublime it would be to slip into something that smelled faintly of him, even laundered. 

She didn’t think she could handle that, so she deflected. “Afraid of being scandalized, Barnes?” And for extra measure. “Those old geezer sensibilities coming back?”

What a wonder of a truce, to have a store-packaged shirt tossed into her lap. His, but not. Just as she was and had been.

Natasha simply went for her own book, determined to not dwell on the bitter irony that was this whole scenario. She stashed his offering away as if it wasn’t anything big, as if the gesture didn’t mean anything much to her.

Bucky just went back to _The Martian_ after settling in the suite’s single chair. Over the pages of her own book, she caught how he would often gaze up at the passing summer scenery and its long expanses of woods punctuated by the backyards of small New York state townships. When he refocused on his book, he’s often flip back and forth a few pages, as if he’d lost where he was reading, as if something else had taken ahold of his concentration.

She sighed, wishing he’d wouldn’t shut out any sort of sympathy or mercy. He didn’t believe he was worthy of it.

As Natasha hadn’t, when Clint defied his orders.

“What happens at Chicago?” her companion finally asked.

“What do you mean?” she returned, setting her reading aside. Of course, she knew what he meant, and she regretted the words almost immediately, the spy run-around.

And, of course, he stiffened. “The train stops at Chicago. When we get off...what happens?”

She stretched her legs. “We play tourist. You ever try Chicago deep-dish pizza?” 

He glanced down at her ankles before meeting her eyes again. “You have a safehouse there?”

“We’re going farther,” she offered. “I know by train’s slow, but it’s keeping us low profile.”

“How much further?” Did he realize his choice of words?

“I don’t want to say. But everything we agreed about this? I’m keeping to my word. No Steve. No Thor. No Hulk.” And then she tested something...something risky. “No Tony Stark.”

His eyes switched from her, downwards, and then back out towards the window, his lips subtly turning down.

Did he know? Did he truly remember what his Kiev file had suggested about an operation in December of 1991?

She continued. “I need the money, Barnes. Your cash goes to fund my safe-houses and aliases. Stark accounts never touch them. I could disappear if I wanted.”

“And your broker?”

“He’s discrete. And smart. He has his own exit strategy, if he decides he needs it.” She cocked her head, wondering where this was going.

“It would be smarter to eliminate him, when he became too valuable, too indispensable,” Barnes said leadenly.

Natasha forgot to breathe for an instant. “Is that the Winter Soldier speaking or Bucky Barnes?” She shook her head, unable to play cool any longer. She looked away, down at her own naked feet. “No one does the kind of things we do completely alone and unsupported. No one survives for long like that. A lone wolf.”

In the corner of her eye, Bucky rose to his feet, and immediately strode towards the door. She decided to watch him pass as he reached up to grab the ballcap and backpack he had stowed away. He still didn’t trust her alone with his possessions. “I’m stretching my legs,” he declared.

Barnes unclasped and opened the door swiftly.

“So you’re canceling our dinner?” Natasha asked, when she wanted to ask him so much more of him. Like if this whole thing was off and he’d get off at the nearest stop.

“I’ll come back,” he tossed over his shoulder as he stepped into the hall. “We made a deal.”

The sliding door fell closed between them. In the next minute, even before locking the door to their compartment, Natasha beat her fists against the seat cushions.


	10. Bucky

_‘No one does the kind of things we do completely alone and unsupported. No one survives for long like that.’_

Romanoff was right, of course. Even the Winter Soldier had his extraction team, his HYDRA operatives or some other mercenary cronies that obeyed his orders, even has he obeyed his ultimate handler. To be most effective, he had always understood, you needed a unit that was quick and multifaceted. 

Ideally, they put trust in each other’s skills. Each other’s instincts.

 _’No one survives for long like that. A lone wolf.’_ Was she referring to the Howling Commandos?

But that harsh solitude was all he could see ahead for him, all that kept Bucky moving onward after the confrontation at the Triskelion was a vengeance against HYDRA. He couldn’t even call it justice; that was Captain America’s job. 

Rogers had a new team now, and Buck wasn’t needed. The archer was just as good of a shot as he was, maybe even better.

One of these days, a blast or a bullet would get Bucky because no one had his back. He was at peace with the prospect; almost counted on it. He’d finally not have to endure the ghosts and the phantom smells of blood and gunpowder and the hauntings of what a knife sounded like impacting bone as he was in the twilight of sleep.

He stalked his way through the rearwards cars of the train - regular seated passenger sections - until he came to the end at a locked baggage compartment. Through the dirty window, he caught boxes and luggage stacked as cargo, with a narrow aisle and yellow-striped lines kept clear of obstacles.

The floor underneath his feet shuddered.

_Deathtrap._

_Blocked in._

_Blown out._

_Cold, bitter air battering his face as he clung to something. As it gave._

_Salvation was only a hand's grasp away._

“Fuck,” he breathed to himself, feeling his gut twist, his palm sweat.

He pivoted around to find another train attendant, a slight woman with rich hair put into a series of braids, gaze up at him. 

“Can I help you?”

It was a blessing that the uniformed employee was so tiny, smaller than Natasha, as not to have anything in common with soldiers bearing down in his nightmares.

He swallowed, looking over her shoulder to the way he came. “I...uh...must have gotten turned around.”

“Where are you seated, sir?” she continued.

Buck figured this could go bad very quickly. That his shuffling and denial and confusion looked utterly suspicious. If he didn’t do something now...

He started: “Front-most sleeper car. Bedroom A,” then began patting down his pockets. There wasn’t a ticket there, but it was a decent stall-tactic as he pulled out folded cash in a clip from his hip jeans pocket to eventually stuff it into the back. “My girlfriend thought she left her iPhone in the bar car. Sorry. My ticket’s with her.”

“The lounge is towards the front of the train,” the attendant clarified, stepping helpfully out of the way. “You can also file a lost-and-found report online on our website.”

“Thanks,” he said, shifting his backpack on his shoulder. 

The subtle show of wealth allowed him to get by and walk now ‘up-train’ without further interrogation. It was more a fleeing than anything else.

One more car up, he tossed himself into a row that had two empty seats. His heartbeat began to quicken, not slow.

One sight of the interior of a cargo car threw him backward seventy years. A shivering began in his chest and radiated down every limb he had been granted at birth. And the one that was prosthetic, just below his shoulder, tingled and throbbed.

He swallowed, clenching his eyes shut, and forced himself to breathe. Hold the air in his lungs...stillness.

Still. Still.

Still prove himself not cravenly. Prove himself to the men determined -- despite blinded eyes or asthmatic, frail passages --to fight on despite the odds.

_’Don’t disappoint me, James. You are not the son of a coward. Look at your friend...Steven's father gave his life and he’s prepared to do just the same.’_

And now his cheeks were burning.

At least Romanoff wasn’t here to see him panic, half-drowning in the quicksand of his own fears and doubts, echoes of decades and decades rattling around in him.

He’d just have to ride it through, because no matter how hard he tried, Buck could not take the coward’s way out, be it bullet or bridge.

But one day soon, it’d all end in a fight. Just as George Barnes was willing for his son to go. So a father could put a gold star up in a window somewhere in Brooklyn. So he could be finally proud.

* * *

Hours later, when Bucky was able to get himself together, he put his reading away and walked back to their quarters.

There was some sort of scent in the air...chemical. Like a cleaning agent but sharper.

She called to him that the door was unlocked, and when he entered he found his companion with her bare toes stretched wide by some sort of odd sponge, painting her toenails a pinkish-orange hue from a thin bottle. A case of grooming tools (or were they lockpicks?) was set on the small, foldable table beside her. Her hand was amazingly steady, given the occasional sway of the train.

The summer sun was still up even in the early evening. Through the long train windows, it dappled on her red hair, making it flame in his eyes in various shades of umber and gold and mahogany.

He tore his eyes away before Natasha hopefully noticed his rudeness, closing the door behind him.

“How was your walkabout?” she asked leisurely, not even bothering to glance away from her pedicure, as if she really was just some sort of bored tourist.

“You mean...how was making contact with my handler?” he returned acerbically, stepping again to the opposite seat, his backpack still slung over his shoulder. “That’s what you think, right?”

She sighed, frowning in concentration as she brushed her pinky toe. “You’re not that good. May have picked up a few tricks somewhere, but you’re not a spy, James Barnes.”

Had she trailed him on his excursion? Put a bug in his pack somehow? Stuck some kind of tracker underneath the jacket-cover of the book she had suggested, just to monitor him? Went through the other satchel that held mostly clothes and extra ammunition?

She capped the bottle of polish, and just waited as her work dried. “A little paranoia goes a long way.”

And what, exactly, did she mean by _that?_

He sat down in the chair across from her. He still kept his bag close by. “The woman saying that doesn’t paint her toenails pink. Or leave the door unlocked.”

“It’s coral,” she corrected, then shrugged lightly. “Living as your alias, doing what they would do, is a great way to avoid detection in long-term assignments.”

Bucky had to try very hard not to fixate on her ankles or calves as she leaned back on the couch, the hem of her dress being just above her knees yet still hiding her small pistol. He switched his gaze to the outside world. “I practice enough with the gambling and giving way too much to other vets on the street.”

“There has to be more to Zach Sheridan than that,” she remarked. Her book was then obscuring her face again as she twirled her drying foot lazily in front of one of the vents in the cabin.

He checked his watch. 1734.

Buck found the deck of cards tucked in with the train literature and doled himself out a game of solitaire. It was a long trip halfway across the continent. May as well get used to silence in her company.


	11. Natasha

Natasha found herself at the last chapter in her book, frowning at the pages.

If she could have predicted this train trip would turn into a multi-day journey, she would have brought more serious literature than the supernatural-romance paperback, or at least something else to read still in tune with Samantha’s persona. And of course, the final chapter ended as most of the genre did, with the heroine overcoming both physical and emotional dangers to have unfettered, unimpeded love.

The reading was something she should have set aside, not continued to indulge herself. Not with Bucky Barnes sitting across from her, keeping his eyes down on his card game with solid attention, only occasionally taking a sip on the complimentary bottled water as he played.

It would be better, she decided, to think of him as a twin brother to the man both given and taken away from her by the Red Room. Yes. That trick-of-mind may just get her through, keep her at her distance.

She flexed her hands on the paperback, wanting to feel the mink texture of his hair slide through her fingers, his lips trace the contours of her neck. It was practice for their cover, she could say, only practice…

But it would not be real. 

She tossed the finished book to the other end of the couch, where it thudded against the wall of the compartment.

Barnes jolted in his chair, his fists instantly in a defensive pose, his eyes immediately locked at the source of the noise.

Oh, great.

“That was me,” she remarked, sitting up and snatching back the offending object. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He frowned and sighed, his shoulders untensing. “The ending? Guess you didn’t like it?”

“The whole thing was hardly what you’d call ‘high literature’,” she replied, dodging around the details of a fantasy lycanthrope-human romance.

Bucky gathered his cards on the small table back into a pile. “You could borrow something of mine,” he said with a hint of casual genuineness. Perhaps that is what made his duffle so heavy: bullets and books.

“What do you have?” she replied, hiding her curiosity.

Her companion rose and hitched up the duffle from where it was stored, setting it on the chair he occupied, putting himself between her and the contents. He unzipped the main pocket, and then slid his hand in, rummaging for only a moment.

When he turned around, Natasha found the two paperbacks in his hands beaten and well-used. Perhaps the best of a second-hand store find. He looked at the spines as if he didn’t remember exactly what he carried, his two eyebrows come together for an instant. “ _’To Kill a Mockingbird’_ and _’Lord of the Flies’_ ,” Barnes read, passing them to her. “I guess...kids read these in high school now. They were on some list somewhere…”

“What did you think of them?” Natasha asked openly, setting the books down beside her.

“I think that the authors got it right. Most people are savage shits,” he responded. He zipped up his bag with such speed, the ripping sound only emphasized his words.

“And what about you?” she asked softly.

“I’m worse,” he stated, putting the duffle away again. There was a hardness to his eyes, a set to his jaw. “I did what I did...feeling nothing.”

“That couldn’t have always been the case.” She watched him closely, how he looked down at his feet for a moment, as if deeply remorseful.

Barnes then blinked, lifted his hand to the curtain on the door and gave it a small tug, to assure that no one was seeing in. He nodded once, as if agreeing with his own inner monologue. “I doubt it started with HYDRA.”

It was Natasha’s turn to sigh. She had been there, wrestling with the sins, believing herself unworthy of compassion until Clint went off script and plopped her down for a month with his wife and kids. They wore her walls down with home cooking and clean, honest, kind living in their sanctuary, unconcerned that they were harboring someone who had dozens of ways of killing them.

Bucky didn’t know it yet, but Natasha was about to give him similar treatment. She wished she had her ‘niece’ Lila with her, given that Barnes had three younger sisters he left at home when he went away to war.

She turned off the topic. “Our dinner has to be soon.”

He checked his watch, strapped to his right wrist and not his left, for reasons of not drawing attention to his bionic plated arm. “Half an hour or so.”

Natasha grabbed her bag. “I’m going to freshen up, then.”

He settled back in the chair as she used the tiny private bathroom, taking deep and slow breaths to refocus herself. She then stepped outside to wash her hands and use the mirror to brush out her hair, twisting it a casually messy bun like one did on a vacation.

There wasn’t much that went on in their cabin that wasn’t captured by one reflection or another. As Natasha saw to obscuring herself in subtle ways to strangers so that she couldn’t possibly be the Black Widow, she used the angles to frame a ghostly image of Barnes in their window against her own, clearer visage. Face pressed against face, at least in illusion.

Was he looking out again at the scenery, indirectly at her, or both? The way he stared sometimes she couldn’t tell whether it was concentrating or a complete lack-thereof. This included when he set his eyes to her.

If she cared for him now, if she _loved_ some part of him now obliterated by HYDRA’s work, she had to set aside impulses from years ago, keep her word, and be a guide part of the way back from the darkness and confusion. James Barnes could not run before he could walk, not when it came to trusting others and himself again. That much she must and would honor, as glum as the prospect was.

Frosted lipstick and luminescent blush gave Natasha a summer-like glow. She didn’t need to be herself, carrying the burdens of memory.

“Are you ready, Mr. Sheridan?” she asked, twisting and capping the lipstick, tossing it and the other makeup behind a small cabinet as if she intended to stay longer. She looked over at him as he stood.

The corner of his mouth twitched, just slightly, before setting back to their neutrality. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and grabbed their reservation card. “As I’ll ever be.”

* * *

It was all very gentile and orderly as she and Bucky waited in the lounge car for their 8 o’clock reservation to be called. While they waited for the last group of diners to vacate, Barnes asked if she wanted a drink from the bar.

He had a whiskey on the rocks while she went with a bloody mary. 

Passengers were all around them, so she kept the chat vague. “The train route goes through Indiana. You were there as a kid, right?”

Her companion furrowed his brow. “After I was born there? A...a summer..." He blinked. “Maybe.” He shrugged, sipping. “Cousins or something.”

“Ever look them up?” She tilted her head a little, wondering how much research Barnes did in his past.

“No point in it. Not like anyone would remember me. Rather too long ago, you think?” He rattled the ice in his glass, studying the melting cubes in the amber liquid.

She pressed, wondering how far and how much Barnes would go along so as to appear warm to his travel-mate. “Still. Family’s family.”

“If I wanted to do that…” He shrugged, setting down his glass on the narrow lounge table between them.

“Being a great-uncle doesn’t appeal to you?” How to tell him that she had actually found his sister’s kin, still in the New York City area? Steve knew about them too. Natasha could only guess that it was guilt that kept him away.

After that question, he stared directly at her, his features falling fast from neutral to troubled. She had pushed too much, and now she witnessed how his internal walls rose and his mouth was thinning and hardening shut.

The train’s intercom system suddenly came to life. _”Our dining car is now open for our 8 O’clock reservations. Please have your reservation card ready for the attendant as you enter.” ___

__Both she and he left their drinks to queue up into the dining car with her last question unanswered. Upon reading the names on the reservation card, they were escorted to the back table by the host, the arrangements for a table to themselves having been passed on ‘down the line’ from their attendant hours ago._ _

__Bucky took the seat against the wall without saying a word to her, setting his backpack on the empty space of the other seat. She unshouldered her purse. Natasha’s back would be to most of the train, obscuring her from eyes that could recognize her given enough time. She tried not to think too much of it, that unspoken understanding of optimum seating that came so easily, as if they were on a mission again._ _

__Their table had white linens and a few fresh flowers in a vase next to the train window._ _

__“Swank, huh?” she asked over her menu._ _

__She watched muscles in her companion’s jaw tighten. “I just go to delis or bodegas,” he finally answered. “It’s easy. They are on every corner. When you skip around, no one remembers." It was a subtle admission of loneliness._ _

__A uniformed waitress came and asked for their choice of drinks. Natasha decided she had enough of booze and went with an iced tea. Bucky went with a cola, flexing his left, gloved hand on the edge of the table as he did so. They confirmed their dinner choice._ _

__Natasha decided she had asked enough prodding questions for a while, and simply stared out the window of passing scenery, waiting for him to speak._ _

__While the rest of the diners buzzed around them with get-to-know-you chat, he finally came up with: “Do you have friends in Chicago?”_ _

__She shook her head once. “No. It’s not really...international. Just a stopping point.” She then inquired,“You? After your tour?”_ _

__He furrowed his brow, as if realizing once more than he was supposed to be Sheridan more than Barnes in their charade for the public. “Not much,” he responded slowly. “I did...California for a bit.”_ _

__He cleared his throat, and small shift in his demeanor as he looked her in the eye and gave her a subtle twitch of a knowing smile. “Vegas. That was too hot.” Too many cameras. Too much heat. Too many people noting him. That’s where he may have been going. "I didn't even bother."_ _

__In an impulse, Natasha reached her right hand over towards Barnes across the white of their tablecloth She turned her palm upwards. “We’re going nowhere like that. Trust me.”_ _

__Zach and Samantha were supposed to be lovers. He was supposed to casually touch her in small affections. He started._ _

__Barnes lifted up his left hand from under the table, the subtly-gloved one, and in mirroring her, he slowly reached towards the invitation. As he just brushed over her fingertips, the soft leather catching just barely on her nails, their waitress navigated the narrow train aisle to them, two plates of salad and a basket of warm, baked rolls now encroaching._ _

__His arm coiled back; Natasha made room by snaking away her own, moving her glass aside._ _

__“Where you two headed?” their server asked in that friendly, curious tone that waitstaff used._ _

__Barnes shrugged a little and offered. “Chicago, for starters,” as his salad was set down in front of him._ _

__“I’m such a Cubs fan,” the middle-aged woman declared. “Blame my Gramps, rest-his-soul. One of these days, the Curse has to be reversed.” Having served, she took a half step away from their table, making a show of her sport’s enthusiasm for the dining car with an enthusiastic voice and gesticulations like praying. “It’s gotta happen. Even the Red Sox had their day, am I right? 1945 needs a major do-over if you ask me!”_ _

__It was a good thing that Natasha wasn’t drinking her tea at the moment. She may have sputtered it._ _

__The man frozen-in-time took it all in stride for once. Even his eyes seemed to hint at energy and life. “You know what they say? ‘Wait till next year?’” he returned with decent volume, taking up his napkin to spread it in his lap._ _

__Their server chuckled, snapped her fingers, then pointed almost accusingly to Buck-Zach. “Dodgers, then?” Great. Not just a fan. A baseball ‘super-fan’, if she knew that sort of league trivia._ _

__Natasha-Samantha sunk a little into her seat and covered her face with her hand, as if she was nursing a long-running headache. The whole dining car locked into a table-to-table discussion on the history and minutiae of baseball is not what they needed to remain incognito, not by a long shot._ _

__Yet she caught the bit of color and animation come to Barnes’ face as he confirmed: “Since I was a kid.”_ _

__The admission from him got an “Ah-hah!” and a few claps from the waitress, congratulating herself on catching the reference._ _

__Buck just ran with it, with a fluid ease that resurfaced in a pattern that Natasha had not yet put a finger on. “The Brooklyn days were the best, you gotta admit!”_ _

__In the next breath, he looked from their server back to Natasha, then cleared his throat, toned it down. “Well...maybe we’ll catch a few Cubs’ innings at a bar,” he offered lamely, as if recognizing his girlfriend/fiance/whatever had no care for sports. “But we’ll probably just go to some galleries or something. Sam’s got this thing for photography. Right, honey?”_ _

__It was hard to tell whether he was baiting her or covering for them both._ _

__“Yeah. I want to redo the guest room,” she said just loud enough. “And not into some tacky sports shrine thing.”_ _

__Through gaps in her fingers, Natasha saw her dining companion sigh and give their waitress a ‘what-can-a-man-in-love-do?’ look between the two women._ _

__“I’ll be back in a bit with your entrees,” the server excused herself, rather than get in the middle of a row between a couple that had bribed their way to private dinner seats._ _

__The guests in the dining car all went back to their usual talk. Natasha eventually lowered her obscuring hand._ _

__Barnes poked at his salad with his fork as if he had not used the utensil in a while, eating a few of the greens in silence._ _

__“Can we?” he finally asked, hushed._ _

__“Can we _what_?” _ _

__“Look to see if the Cubs are playing tomorrow on home field? Wrigley, right? While we’re hanging out? I’ll pay.”_ _

__Natasha stared at him after her last bite, so very torn between wanting to return to Barnes something that she knew precious from Steve’s stories -- a boy’s ballpark-green paradise on a summer day -- and keeping focused on reaching their ultimate destination._ _

__A half-hopeful light was there across the linens in twin slate-blues she once cherished, warmed by the magic hour of light from a setting sun glancing through the train’s windows._ _

__“I’ll take a look on my phone. When we’re back in the cabin,” she equivocated. “They could be playing somewhere else, or at the wrong time...”_ _

__He set down his fork. “But if it works?”_ _

__She conceded, thinking to what _vigor_ had come to him in the brief exchange with their server, of what was there as it had been before. “Maybe a few innings. Like you said.”_ _

__Zach-Buck smiled again, almost abashedly. Understated charming in its way. “Thanks, darlin’. You’re so good to me.”_ _

__It had been her and Coulson’s idea pitched to Director Fury, back when Captain Rogers was just being thawed out by S.H.I.E.L.D.. The agents put that old recorded Dodgers game on the radio as he came to. Steve had seen through it in a matter of seconds. Yet now, Barnes could not see how Natasha clutched and dragged her nails under the table up her left knee, forbidden by him of mentioning anything having to do with those good-ol’-times with a pre-enhanced Steve._ _

__“It’s no big deal," she was forced to say on behalf of propriety._ _


	12. Bucky

It was a pillar in his otherwise foggy mind.

Baseball.

Bucky could almost smell the paint on the bleachers, newly renewed and dried just in time for opening day. The sounds of the organ piped over the speakers echoed in his ears with the sound of a train horn. The bite of a hot dog with the works, bursting with juices, washed down with a stadium beer, was practically in his mouth.

Why had HYDRA left him this? What other little niches deep in his skull had they not touched?

Natasha and he came back to their cabin from the dinner to find that their attendant had indeed converted the lower seating and upper berth into neatly-made beds. There window’s curtain was also pulled tight, blocking out lights from the tracks and midwestern neighborhoods.

She had volunteered hours earlier to take the top. As soon as she fell asleep, he planned to pull out one his notebooks and record the impressions.

The Black Widow was likely very adept at pretending to slumber, but he had his headlamp and could shield his journal with the hardcover book he was reading. Not that it was necessary. Not with this.

Baseball.

Natasha sat on top of the blankets of the lower bed, and pulled out her smartphone. He could use the excuse of his paranoia to not take his eyes off her as she scrolled with practiced flicks of her finger and typed a few words.

“Cubs versus the Nationals. At home field,” she responded, the glow of the screen taking over the natural color of her eyes. “First pitch at one-twenty.”

It was odd wanting something for the pleasure of it, feeling the desire to run towards rather than _away_. Bucky hardly knew what to make of it. He turned around once, twice, pacing in the small space, flexing his metal hand.

She pressed a button, the screen changed. She rose, tossing the device on her own bunk. She dug out the packaged shirt he had loaned her from another storage compartment, extruding it from its plastic with a quick rip.

“It’s a big risk, you know,” Natasha continued, laying the situation out for him. “You can’t get into the stadium with those bags of yours, not even the backpack. You sure you want to leave that cash and whatever at a station locker?”

Bucky looked down to his feet, feeling his stomach sink. _Stupid,_ he thought to himself. _She’s reminding you of just how idiotic this idea is._ “Nevermind, then,” he blurted, sad and angry and ashamed all at once. “You’re right.”

His companion disappeared into their tiny bathroom before he sighed and threw himself on the larger, lower berth where she had just sat. The mattress was slightly warm, a ghost of her presence. He blocked out his eyes with the crux of his right elbow as his skull landed on a pillow. His eyes stung, his throat tight.

“What am I?” he whispered lowly to himself. “Twelve?”

He had no right to a carefree summer’s afternoon. Ever again. Not after he had stolen that from dozens of others. Especially the children.

In a few minutes, he heard the click of the bathroom door unlocked. He realized that he hadn’t even bothered to take his boots off as she washed her hands and face in the cabin’s sink. 

Being on his own, he never knew when he’d have to hoof it, even when catching an hour or two of sleep, with HYDRA or a crime syndicate two-steps behind. He changed his socks about every twelve hours, a lesson hard-drilled in him from the time before he was the _Soldat_ , yet he rarely went shoeless, even if his feet could take sharp gravel and gritty pavement for miles and miles.

“Your turn,” she stated, expertly launching herself gracefully up to the top berth, hinges creaking ever-so-slightly as Natasha’s weight settled. He hadn’t even the will to ask her how the loaned shirt fit her as he peeled himself up and got a change of what could serve as nightclothes: another long-sleeved cotton shirt and boxer-briefs. Not that he planned to get one wink while riding on this train, but it was best for their cover.

He unlaced his boots, pulling them off and setting them side-by-side towards the window and out of their way. 

Before Bucky fully undressed, he peed into the small, solitary toilet, shaking his limp dick of the last drop, wishing he could flush his self-pity down the drain with his piss.

When he exited, he found Natasha had turned the lights low in the cabin, leaving only the reading spotlights above both of their berths. He barely glanced at her as he took his turn washing up for the night, brushing his teeth in an efficient manner. He guessed she was reading his second-hand copy of _To Kill a Mockingbird_.

He grabbed his own book, tugged out the twin pillows, and used them to set himself up for the night in his solitary watch. His left hand gleamed in the spotlight as he found his page. Rather than dwell more on his disappointment, he focused on reacquainting himself with Mark Watney’s plight.

Sometime later there was a click -- the flip of a switch -- and the light went out above him.

“Goodnight,” he said, because it was the courteous thing to do, even if his heart (or any part of him) wasn’t into the sentiment.

“There’s another way,” the voice above him returned, just over the hum of the traveling train.

He debated not answering at all, chewing the possibilities around, and coming up blank. “We don’t have the time to recon the stadium to sneak our way in. You know that.” His reply may have been a waste of words.

“Trust me?” came from the dark. “You can keep your things with you.”

Why did she have to sound like an angel from on high?

He closed his book, clenching it on the spine. “It was an act, Romanoff. In the dining car. With the waitress and the baseball. Wasn’t that what I was supposed to do? Hold your hand? Pretend?” His words sounded harsh, even to himself.

Natasha wasn’t baited or fooled by his lie. “Our bargain was that you followed me when and where I decided, James Buchanan Barnes, if you can remember back to twelve hours ago.”

And, fuck him, he did recall it. What was she playing at? “I remember,” he glowered.

“So?”

Trust her. Trust her like Steve did. Only now Bucky had compromised her by making his own demands for her silence to his whereabouts. He just sighed, feeling like shit. 

Natasha persisted: “It’s a simple question. Are you stepping up to the plate or not?” The curtain of her hair came into his spotlight as she leaned over the edge of her bed to lock eyes with him, upside down.

In the backlight, without her makeup, she looked younger. Like a kid-sister...or something else.

“Okay,” he found himself saying. “Alright.”

The Black Widow actually winked at him. “Good choice,” she offered, before disappearing again.

Bucky blinked at the pages of his book for a long while, unable to focus on the narrative. Steve must have let on about the Dodgers to the other Avengers. She could have made a very good guess that the ‘best friends from childhood’ shared a passion for the diamond.

It was a simple request: trust her. He wanted to. But that wink. What was he to make of that? Flirtation?

He shook his head. It was another ploy, the blurring of lines between their covers and themselves. Living as her alias was what she had said. That was all. That was it.

Figuring he had the answer, he was able finally to focus on the next chapter and the next few hundred miles to Chicago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is your post-holiday chapter. 
> 
> Also, BuckyNat fans may want to check out the [2016 Buckynat Secret Santa fics!](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/BuckyNat_Secret_Santa_2016)


	13. Natasha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This WIP is active again. Long story short: The results of the U.S. Presidential election and some other life things sapped my creativity and my writing time for months. Thanks to everyone that subscribed to me during my absence and left comments.

When she finally turned off the light and tugged the sheets of her bunk around her, Natasha began to doubt whether she had really done Barnes a favor by finding a way around Wrigley Field’s security measures.

Those bags were all that he had in the whole world. His life-raft in his sea of confusions and the dangers of a life as a fugitive. It made perfect sense that he would not abandon them, not even for an afternoon. Her solution was a small stroke genius, but he treated it with suspicion, as she would have, too.

Was it Samantha that wanted to surprise her boyfriend? Was it Natalia that recalled a shabby tenement in Istanbul as she worked undercover with him, when she stumbled upon his pining for hotdogs instead of the foreign foods that were stocked in their meager kitchen? She couldn’t tell anymore, and that concerned her.

‘Trust me’ is what one said when, under most circumstances, the person shouldn’t be at all. An amateur move borne out of the impulse of affection that had no more place in this world or between the two of them. Still, it was too late to take it back, and the chance of it raining tomorrow in Chicago was just about nil, according to the forecasts on her phone.

Natasha stared in the near-darkness of their cabin, fingering the rolled-up sleeve of the navy-blue shirt he had offered her to sleep in, having nothing else of him to touch. Her companion below shifted now and then, turned a scraping page in the hardcover. She may have caught a scratching of pen, too, but her hearing, however practiced, was not that of a super-soldier. His reading light was still on; he’d probably have it on for the rest of the night. 

Why had she fucking winked at him?

She knew why.

Natasha closed her eyes, her fingers of her left hand floated from her wrist to her ear, caressing it as she could only piece together from the soft torture of her sometimes-dreams. The nails scratched along her neck as she summoned a lowly guttered sound of satisfaction from nothing but her imagination to echo in her ear: a throaty, almost-lupine chuckle breathing at the short hairs near her temple.

_’I want to give you something gentle, Natalia.’_

Something not what the Soldier was made to be.

Knuckles dragged across her collarbone and then fell. Leaving her blissful and aching together at the same time. 

’When are we going to fuck?’ she had asked, horny and desperate to be claimed by someone who had no secret agenda. Her higher, youthful voice was bolder.

’When I’m less like an animal and more like a person,’ the not-Soldier returned, calm and introspective. 

At least that is what she remembered how he answered her. It wasn’t just the conditioning and the drugs and the Red Room’s mind-games that played havoc with how she recalled things from that other life. It was fucking Time Itself.

Natasha willed her hand not to go any further. In a few days, she could unearth the chrome metal toy she kept in a lower drawer, reserved for when she was particularly sentimental. But not now, not with James a breath away and below her.

The nights would be the hardest, when she had to struggle that, yes, she still wanted that version of the man that had been her lover and mentor restored. For years, the Red Room had used the promise of it to assure her loyalty. Natalia grew older and came to understand the lie for what it was.

Natasha closed her eyes and began counting her breaths. Inhale. One-Stalingrad. Two-Stalingrad. Three. Four. Exhale to the same count. Over and over.

Her thoughts began to drift and scatter. The subtle motions and sounds of the train transported her into the realm of sleep.

* * *

_Natasha walked through the twilight of a dimmed seating car, the lights turned low for the overnight. Passengers were slumped in various states, some leaning onto each other, others with their heads cocked at uncomfortable angles, their mouths slack._

_She passed row after row of seats, an urgency driving her to look for something. Someone who was supposed to be with her._

_To look for_ him _among the strangers._

_Certainly, if she found one of the attendants...but car after car was unsupervised. Silent but for the noise of the rails. Twilit except for the panning squares of sodium orange lights as the transport glided within a blink through another hollowed-out American hamlet._

_In her growing sense of urgency, she reached towards one of the passengers, touching the young woman’s shoulder lightly, hoping to wake her and ask if she had noticed a dark-haired man with a backpack pass by._

_“Miss?!” Natasha whispered, shaking the woman more vigorously, feeling the limpness telegraph up her arm._

_As a head lolled back, revealing bloodshot, bulging eyes and blue lips, Natasha understood._

_They were all dead. She pivoted and saw that some were strangled, some had been shot, others had foaming mouths hinting at poison._

_Her marks. His marks. A trainful of them from decades past._

_Over the intercom:_ ’Do you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything?’ _It was Loki and Zola and the Madame all at once._

_There was only one place to go: to the head of the snake._

_She stalked carefully through the last passenger car, taking her time in the swaying diaphragm between each to gauge what was ahead through the dirty glass windows. Unlike what was behind her, the bar car was filled with movement and sound._

_She pressed her back against the cold steel next to the rubber-sealed door, then opened the latch, peeking in with as much cover as she could give herself in the tight, cylindrical spaces._

_The smell of cigar smoke and the scent of bourbon layered with perfume. The hum of low conversation over the general noise of the speeding train wafted through the gap. Quietly, her hand ready to reach for her Beretta, she edged her way into the compartment._

_The beautiful and rich and powerful in their suits and gown and uniforms swallowed her into their throng, but they ignored her as she deftly wove her way through. Natasha was never one of them, not truly and not for long._

_She was almost to the far door when a dark-haired man with a well-groomed goatee swiveled around on his bar-seat, using an upraised leg as a kind of turnstile to block her progress down the crowded aisle. His action a flesh and bone barrier as his patent-loafer foot wedged on the edge of a small lounge table just across her path._

_“Just like the old times, doncha think?” Tony flashed an insincere smile at her. HIs tie was loose. He played with a half-full cocktail glass in his hand. “The secrets...the triple impostering?”_

_“I can’t talk right now,” she returned, pressing at his knee. “Let me through.”_

_He didn’t budge. “Sure, you don’t tell me. I get it. You understood before anyone what it would do to the team. But Cap?” Her blocker’s eyes narrowed, the fine muscles of his face tightened. Aggression, she read. “Shouldn’t Rogers know you banged his best friend for the Russian cause?” He took a swill. She could smell the vodka. “Or was it HYDRA’s?”_

_“That’s not what it was,” Natasha countered, coldly, but she doubted the certainty in her voice._

_“Then what was it?” Tony asked softly. HIs dark brown eyes shifted away from her face, just slightly, grew soft and unfocused in a way that told of a life-long grief masked behind sarcasm._

_“Not now,” she dodged as she called upon her muscles and reflexes to slip past her fellow Avenger and to the final door, beyond to the locomotive that powered the train._

_“It’s locked,” a voice from beyond the dead remarked in his usual confidence from the well-to-do crowd. Alexander Pierce. “You’ll never reach him.”_

_Natasha was done playing subtle. She twirled and drew her pistol, aiming it at the aged man's center of mass. At seeing the weapon, the bystanders fled to the far side of the car evacuating in a half-panicked crush through the rear door. The bartender simply ducked behind his station. But Pierce didn’t move._

_“Then_ unlock _it,” she demanded at gunpoint._

_Without taking her eyes off her target, she sought aid from behind. “Tony, if you have your suit, I could use the backup to burn a hole in that door.”_

_Tony scoffed at her back. “So help you help Barnes? You are certain your assassin-whatever won’t come for me next?”_

_Pierce smiled faintly from in front of her sight, watching the situation unfold. “Seems you might be choosing the wrong side, Romanoff.”_

_“Fuck off,” she spat._

_Even without the pistol, Natasha was the most physically dangerous person in the car. She could afford the bullets. Before he could react, her free hand seized Tony by his dangling tie, dragged him roughly out of the way. She directed four rounds each at the frosted window and the frozen latch._

_They each bounced harmlessly, as if the door itself was made out of the same stuff as the Winter Soldier’s gleaming arm. Not even a spider-web crack on the safety glass. She exhaled, imagining what to try next...perhaps she could get in from the outside?_

_Catching himself, Tony coughed, getting his breath from her assault. Over the ring of the gunfire still in her ears, she heard him speak into some device on his person. “JARVIS? See that Natasha’s Tower clearances are revoked and her access to the Avengers accounts removed.”_

_Stark was not above retaliating in his own way. “Yes, JARVIS. I’m deadly serious.”_

_She started her apology too late. “Tony. We are on the same team. You just can’t --”_

_The train lurched._

_“Have fun out in the cold, Nat,” her once-colleague snipped as he rose and walked past Pierce without so much as an acknowledgment. “You Ruskies seem to get a kick out of it.”_

_The car shuddered and bucked again. Was the whole thing about to derail?!_

_Alexander Pierce simply held up a glass of champagne, toasting. “Hail HYDRA.”_

* * *

In the half-darkness and hum, the world underneath Natasha jolted once more. Her heart pounded in uncertainty, edging on the panic that somehow Tony -- the real Tony -- actually knew all about her and the Winter Soldier.

“Romanoff!” Barnes called below, punctuated by another hitch where she lay.

She blinked, sorting the dream out from reality.

Her companion was kicking at the bottom of her bunk, the source of the jolts all along. Natasha tossed around once in her covers, unable she to look at him directly yet.

“I’m awake!’ she called down, tasting the bitterness of the nightmare ebb from her mouth.

“I thought...you talked in your sleep about...about Pierce so I…I thought you might…” He had shielded himself with the mattress and materials of her upper berth rather than touch her directly. He probably didn’t dare startle her just to get a fist or worse in his face. 

“Thanks,” she returned, reaching for her smartphone for the time. 5:46 AM. Dawn and arriving in Chicago would happen soon.

She realized that his reading light had been turned off.

From the darkness, Barnes offered up to her, “I dream about him, too, sometimes. He...well. Nevermind.”

Natasha swallowed back the ache in her heart, the urge to slip off her bunk to offer him her arms to return both the compassion and the vulnerability he had just, so warily, revealed to her. 

It would be too much. It would spook him.

“The s.o.b. is dead. Nicholas Fury shot him twice even before the Triskelion buried him for good,” she offered by way of comfort instead.

He sighed. “I know.” Barnes didn’t sound convinced at all. How could someone twist your reality in such a brutal fashion and truly be gone from the world? They couldn’t. Like the Madame of the Red Room haunted her, Pierce would always live as a spectre in the house of his mind.

Taking a few breaths to conclude what next to say, she reached for one of the few subjects that had the chance of getting Barnes out of his funk. “Well, whatever happened to him, you should know that S.H.I.E.L.D. intel has it that no-one loyal to HYDRA has _ever_ rooted for the Cubs. So I’m pretty sure we’re safe.”

“And I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit,” he returned, but amusement colored that subtle Brooklyn accent back to his often tired-sounding voice. She heard him shift to a sit, zip on cargo pants over his boxers, and lastly lace up his boots. He did not need illumination to dress even if he needed it to read; another benefit of the serum.

Natasha propped up her head on her bent elbow and watched Barnes’ shadow as he stood and pulled on his gloves, one after another in a practiced, smooth fashion. “What’s going on?”

“I’m not going to sleep, so may as well give you more peace. I’ll go find a seat somewhere for a while...maybe bring back coffee when you’re ready,” he explained, reaching for his backpack. 

She shrugged, sitting up and tossing off her covers from her bare legs. “I may as well start my day, too.”

He shifted and lowered his head, doing that gentleman-like thing of not ogling at her in just (his) long-sleeved shirt and her spare low-cut panties, giving her the space and privacy when she went for her own shower. “How about Oh-Six-Thirty then?”

“Plenty of time.”

Barnes turned away to head for the door to their tiny room, but he paused before unlocking it. “How do you…? I mean, I should know how Samantha takes her coffee.”

Natasha stretched her back slowly. “How do you think?”

“Sugar...or that weird sweetener in the pink packets? But not a lot of cream...maybe just a splash of milk,” her companion guessed.

“That’ll do.” But just after Natasha turned on one of the reading lights, she wagged her finger in warning. “None of the artificial stuff, please. This biochemist I know says too much exposure to that shit will turn your skin green.”

That got Bucky to finally shoot her an alarmed look, real concern setting lines in his brow.

She sighed. “Joke, Sheridan! A stupid Avengers joke I guess I won’t be repeating at a party anytime soon.”

“Ah…” He then unlatched the door, slipping out. “I’ll be back in a bit then. Coffee. One sugar, a splash of milk.”

Barnes left before she could ask him how he imagined Zach took his.


	14. Bucky

As the early sun chased the morning twilight, Buck slipped into an empty seat in a passenger car, setting his backpack on the other unused seat beside him. The base sensation of being alone-among-others returned easily to him as soon as he left Natasha to her shower.

Chicago. What did the Winter Soldier recall of Chicago?

From his pack, Buck withdrew a worn map of the United States that he had copied and taped together at a library, unfolding it. He knew the train’s route from studying the guide provided in their room last afternoon. The instinct for recon was omnipresent. Terrain, escape routes, positions of hostile and friendly forces.

Romanoff was two railcars ahead. He was still uncertain how to categorize her. Temporary ally, he supposed.

As he gazed to the shape of Lake Michigan, he found Chicago at its tip, the lettering designating it as a major city. He tried to recall anything...a mission...a mark…

Nothing.

But what about James Buchanan Barnes?

He exchanged the map for the black journal that preserved the very essentials of his biographic information, thumbing through until he found the Smithsonian brochure of Captain America and the record on Barnes’ wall of memory.

_’After winter training at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, Barnes and the rest of the 107th…’ ___

Wisconsin was just to the north of Chicago. It wouldn’t have been too much stretch of the imagination to think he had passed by train through the city, both on his way out and on his way back to New York City. The railroad was how most troops were conveyed across the country.

_Thousands and thousands of young men...packed in like cattle._

Buck knew by the sudden tightness in his chest what was coming on.

“Fuck,” he softly swore as he dropped the journal into his lap, gulping and staring up at the bars of the overhead luggage rack.

_Caged in like prisoners. Guards and overseers in goggled black suits swarmed around him like sharks, seeking out the sick and the weak._

_He was helpless as they dragged him away, out of the prison facilities and to the ward where the true horrors began._

He was gone.

* * *

“Jesus, Sheridan. I thought you bailed on me.”

“Zach, c’mon...snap out of it.”

“Shit.”

“Alright...can you count with me down from twenty? Just start in your head...count down to being on the train to Chicago with me. Ready?”

“Twenty.”

“Nineteen.”

Her words were in English, not German.

“Eighteen.”

Bucky felt his lips begin to move to form the sounds of the numbers along with her, inaudible at first, but then his breath and tongue worked with more clarity. Was this how he managed to remain sane in the first place? Three. Two. Five...

By the time they reached the single digits, he could sense vibration through his feet and the warmth of sunlight on his cheek. His hands began to unclench.

He blinked and the present world was filling in from the edges, including the woman’s head leaning over him from the next seat back. She was beautiful. Nothing beautiful was where he came from.

“Three,” he joined along with her.

She had green eyes that almost shifted to blue. She half-smiled.

“Two.”

Natasha, he remembered, faintly. Although that wasn’t her name.

“One.”

Buck swallowed and leaned forward, freed from his self-made constraints, raking his hands through his hair as his pulse began to lessen in his ears. God, a flashback. He had a full-blown flashback right on this train. It was a small wonder he hadn’t hurt anyone trying to help him.

“You good now?” she asked, stepping into the aisle. “We’ve got breakfast back in the room.”

He couldn’t bring himself to answer, but he began to stand up to follow her. As he did, the black journal, forgotten, slipped from his lap and tumbled out into the aisle. She immediately swept it up and offered it back to him.

“Thanks,” he replied, now angry at himself to have almost lost something so precious to him. He bent to grab his backpack and slide it back in.

“Was this yours, too?” she said, holding the weathered Smithsonian brochure just over his shoulder for him. “If you have a crush on him, you can just tell me. I won’t get jealous.” Why was Natasha-Samantha teasing him?

“I don’t,” he snarled, snatching the glossy thing and burying that away, too. He zipped his backpack frustratedly and upon lifting his head, he saw that several scattered passengers around them had turned their heads to listen to their interaction. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.” 

He stalked back to their cabin without giving her another look. Buck was absolutely furious at himself, and the sliding door of their quarters was a victim of it; he pushed open with so much force it rattled when it reached the end of its tracks. If the people in the neighboring room weren’t awake yet, they would be now.

His companion closed the door more gently behind them both as he tossed his bag on the floor and himself on the couch that an hour ago had been his bed. The porter must have done it when he brought the breakfast that was laid out on the folding table.

She sat quietly down beside him, waiting for him to speak first.

He rubbed his lips, contemplating. Buck didn’t want to snap again at her. She had just helped. Helped immensely. Why? Was it payback from waking her from a nightmare that he could have well been a part of just as much as Alexander Pierce? No. Probably simple damage control.

“How did you do that?” he finally asked. “Bring me out?” Of hell.

“It’s a technique a friend of mine taught me. He works a lot with veterans,” she offered, rising to settle in the single seat beside him, inventorying their breakfast. “I figured giving it a try was better than shaking you.”

She picked up the complimentary newspaper with one hand, scanning the headlines.

There was a metallic taste on his mouth. “I could have attacked you...or anyone. Then we’d be more than screwed.”

Buck watched as she took up her fork and stabbed at a strawberry. “It would have hurt our cover, agreed. Make us miss that Cubs game.”

He found himself scoffing, contemplating whether he could eat breakfast with his stomach still unknotting. It would probably be better if he could force himself. No one had fresh fruit in Schmitt’s factory, not even the supervisors.

He reached for his backpack to stow it properly before turning back to seat himself across from Natasha.

She pointed to the door the moment he did so, not looking up from her reading, her cheek half-full with a croissant. “You still owe me a hot coffee.”

* * *

There was nearly two grand in hundreds and twenties burning a hole in Buck’s cargo pants when they hailed a cab outside of the train station, straight for Wrigley Field. Natasha said they would need it. Bribes, he guessed.

The more strangers that surrounded them, the more Natasha metamorphosized into Samantha Lamar, a young woman that hadn’t worked an honest day in her life but still wanted slum it among those who had. Was it her money or his he was carrying? They hadn’t really discussed it. But he supposed a man like Sheridan would give his left nut, much less several grand, to be involved with someone like her, even if it would only be a summer fling.

The stop-and-go traffic of central Chicago was at odd counterpoint to the steady regularity of the cross-country train that was punctuated only by announced slows and stops along the way.

Their driver had on the local talk radio station, commentators already analyzing the matchup between the home team and the Nationals. The player’s names were unfamiliar to him even if the shorthand for their stats wasn’t.

Both sitting in the cab’s back seat, his bags between them, Buck turned his head to his companion with her fashionably wide-lensed sunglasses and the same sundress she wore yesterday. She was doing something on her smartphone, and he had to force back the worry that she was alerting Rogers.

However, she had made an agreement, he recalled. Whatever else Natasha may or may not be up to, there was a certain code when one freelanced. Do what was required. Get paid. Keep up your reputation.

Buck debated whether this side-trip would come off the top of the quarter-million he promised or not. Was she doing it as a plausible part of their cover? Was she doing it because another super-soldier had told her that he and his best friend spent a good deal of their Depression-era summers up in the cheap seats?

Outside the cab window, he noticed that the number of fans taking the sidewalk towards the stadium was growing. 

Natasha tossed her phone into her purse and then looked around.

“We’re good here,” she told the driver through the smudged plexiglass partition.

“The stadium is still five blocks,” the man advised.

“Here’s fine,” she re-asserted. “Charge us for the whole way if you want.”

At the curb, Buck passed the cabby a twenty before taking his bags and holding the door for Natasha like a gentleman, closing it behind when she stepped to the sidewalk. She took one good look around and nodded, folding into the flow of fans. Buck followed, reseating his black baseball cap on his head.

The day was warming up, and he tried not to feel self-conscious about wearing long sleeves when most everyone else surrounding them was wearing shorts.

In a few blocks, the two-storey houses ended and the left side of the street opened up. He could make out the tops of the stadium lighting rigs. On the right, the houses gave way to businesses.

Just as he was looking across the street to some sort of bronze statue of a pitcher, he felt Natasha’s hand taking his and tugging him towards a storefront. “Souvenier time.”

She picked out a t-shirt and a white-and-blue striped jersey, giving him an appraising gaze as she did so. After scanning a few more racks, she passed the hangers to him. “Get us a spot in line,” she ordered then disappeared deeper into the women’s section.

Having no reason to argue, he stepped towards the registers, trying not to make anything of when she grabbed his hand out on the street. This was all pretend. Zach could have an afternoon at a ballgame and perhaps enjoy himself, where the Soldier had no right to anything of common humanity. Was that what she was getting at with her coral nail polish and fluffy choice of leisure reading? That one could experience the world differently by just pretending you were someone different?

“Last stuff!” she noted cheerfully, putting a baseball hat, some sort of women’s leggings in gray, and what appeared to be panties with the Cub’s logo front-and-center, down on the counter.

Nearly two-hundred dollars lighter, they exited the store. Samantha swung the bag of their purchases in one hand while she held his right with her other.

“What happens now?” Buck asked, bending closer to her ear to maintain some sense of privacy from the passersby. Across the square was one of the gates into Wrigley, and sure enough, there were metal detector booths run by security personnel.

“We go find our rooftop,” she responded with a squeeze of her hand, tilting her head to indicate they would go further down the street.

As they walked, he looked up and realized that, yes, some of the buildings surrounding Wrigley could be tall enough to get a decent view of the field.

“A long time ago,” she narrated by his side. “And we’re talking a _long_ time ago when dinosaurs and Babe Ruth roamed the earth…” Yes, she was certainly teasing him. “...folks lucky enough to own or rent these buildings would just get up on their roofs and invite their friends to watch the game. Now, pretty much, it’s turned into a business with the works. But, guess what? With the clientele that can afford rooftop tickets, the proprietors don’t see much need for bag checks.”

Buck had to let that all sink in. No skirting the law. No trespassing. No bribes. Just two well-off people taking advantage of privileges afforded.

“C’mon, Zach!” She must have seen the shocked and thoughtful expression on his face from behind her sunglasses. “Have _fun_ a little, just this once. Please. For me.”

He swallowed, torn and doubtful. The real Zach Sheridan, the one in a wheelchair in Virginia, would never have a day gifted to him like this. At least the fake one could try to make the most of it.

“Alright, Sam,” he finally said, trying a small smile. “I’ll step up to the plate.”

She squeezed his hand once more. “That’s the spirit.”

* * *

They donned their fandom camouflage, him in the pinstriped jersey over his regular clothes and her in the Cub’s t-shirt and leggings. Her ponytail stuck out casually in the back of the red and blue logoed hat. They sat together in the outdoor tiered seating, watching each other’s bags as one or the other went for more beer or hot dogs or whatever they wanted from the all-included grill and bar menu. They cheered for the home team, made playful taunts at the Nationals, and chatted with other fans about the Curse and the sport.

Zach-Buck-whomever never remembered feeling so full as when they left the game at the top of the sixth to make it back to the train station. He had gorged on the stadium-style food, and he complained to his companion in the back of the air-conditioned cab that he may never eat again.

“That’s a shame,” she returned, a poke to his ribs over the bags between them. “You really could use a little more muscle or whatever.”

“Is that how you like ‘em, then? Beefy?” The words flew out of his mouth before he realized what he had done. Flirting. Flirting with her like it was the most natural thing in the world. Flirting as if he assumed it would lead somewhere.

“What do you think?” she retorted, dropping her voice into that low siren’s register that could drive men -- and women and aliens -- crazy. It didn’t matter she was in unflattering athletic wear at the moment; he was certain that she could have anyone she wanted as a lover: tall or short, waifish or stacked. 

Because she was the Black Widow. He reminded himself Samantha and Zach were lies and that made their flirting just another act.

Buck cleared his throat and looked away from her. He realized he was no longer smiling. “I think I’ll have the salad for dinner tonight.”

“Suit yourself,” she said neutrally, dropping the conversation in favor for her smartphone.

They would board another Amtrak train soon and continue to head west. If their accommodations were anything like before, there would be little need to keep up pretenses of the happy vacationing couple.

It was a testament to her skill that she had orchestrated an afternoon for him so perfect, the laughter and pleasure and comradery felt genuine. He had forgotten almost completely about the _Soldat_ and all the atrocities both committed by him and to him from the past seventy-odd years. Worst of all, he had felt _good._

 _’Why?’_ he wanted desperately to demand of Natasha. Why? She must have some deep plan that he could not grasp. It was futile to ask. She would just use some empty words that would leave the question no better answered. He’d have to discover the truth another way.

Until then, Buck would have to be careful of falling into her fairytales.


	15. Natasha

On the second leg of their cross-country trip, Natasha and Barnes settled into their bedroom on rails, similar to their first room but now required taking the stairs of the double-decker car.

Her companion stripped out of the Cub’s jersey and hung it up in the tiny closet while Natasha pulled out her toiletries and a phone charger.

They hadn’t spoken much since the cab ride.

The hours before at Wrigley Field had been all that Natasha hoped and more. How under the early summer sun, listening to the announcer and the cheers and the music and the crack of a well-struck fly ball, the man began to transform. Thawing, she supposed, is what you could call it if you were being ironic.

Barnes’ eyes were the first to soften followed shortly by the tenseness of his jaw. By the bottom of the second inning, when the Cubs had caught up 2-2 to the Nationals, he was grinning and hollering along with the dozens of other fans up on their exclusive rooftop (at least when he didn’t have a hot dog or a cheeseburger to consume or one of her questions about the rules to answer).

The game had its own pace, but even when there was little action on the diamond, the spell continued. It was the closest Natasha had come to witnessing something like what she recalled of her lover’s mannerisms when they took those stolen days and squeezed something like happiness out of each precious hour.

“So good to me, Red,” Zach-Buck had thanked her as she handed him a root beer float somewhere in the fourth. 

It took all of her control for not to rip the drink from his hand, straddle his lap and ask if -- no, _beg_ \-- for him to remember her.

But today, she was only Samantha to him. So Natasha just returned to her seat beside him with a pleasant smile, relieved that his attention was drawn back again to the game. However, he wasn’t totally unaware of her, and after a few sips, he offered to share his creamy, frothy beverage invented within the yesteryear of American ice cream parlors and soda shops.

Natasha had passed rather than indulge herself in sucking on the straw where his lips had just been. Still, she soaked in every small detail as if it would be her last. The way the longest lengths of his hair ruffled in the breeze, his five-o’clock shadow, the flash of his teeth as he grinned. Out of the corner of her eye, she had even caught the stain of mustard that coated the corner of his mouth before a quick, subconscious sweep of his tongue dabbed and cleaned it away.

Enough, she had disciplined herself. Enough.

As they drove away from the stadium that afternoon, she had wondered how long the magic would last. 

It turned out: not long at all.

His guardedness returned as she flirted back in the rear bench-seat of the cab, insinuating something more physical between them than mere handholding. She retreated then by occupying herself with her smartphone, checking the predicted weather in the area of her hideaway.

Natasha tried not to second-guess whether the sweetness of the afternoon only made the reality taste doubly bitter, to him and to her both.

As the announcements were made over the intercom that their train was about to get underway, Barnes took up the Amtrak literature. Sitting down, he compared it to his ticket as Natasha was neatening her hair in the small mirror, combing out the ponytail and swapping it for a barrette and styling it softer.

“Browning, Montana,” he observed, breaking the silence. “Blackfeet Indian Nation?”

Natasha set down her brush, lifting her eyebrow as she turned her head to look directly at him. “So, what’s your actual question, Barnes?”

“What’s there? I mean, if we are truly debarking there.” He swallowed and his lips were tightening into a frown. “If it’s not on some sort of need-to-know basis.”

“It rather is.” She contemplated further, weighing the risks of giving him about twenty-four hours of lead-time with the knowledge. From a hidden pocket the purse at her feet, she extracted the jamming device once again. She held it up. “If I tell you, we’re stuck at the hip again.”

“I don’t want to go to the dining car tonight,” was his answer. He had eaten enough stadium food to last a regular person almost a week.

Natasha nodded then, and turned the device on, even though it may make things spotty for the passengers to the sides and below them. She set it in the tiny medicine cabinet as if it was just another makeup accessory, then padded to sit down next to him on the convertible couch. He squared his shoulders.

She explained. “In Browning is my Jeep. A beat-up Wrangler from the nineties. And it spooks the porters if you get off before what’s on your ticket. It’d start drawing attention.”

“And where do we go with the Jeep?” He must have read a certain expression on her face. He scoffed. “Nevermind.”

The underground station scenery outside their window began to move, slowly at first, but then with the greater momentum, leaving Chicago and their idyllic summer afternoon behind.

Barnes put the route-guide back where he found it, then sighed. He slumped a little into the corner of the cabin, between the outside wall and the couch. His eyes half-drooped. Natasha decided he was more tired than he let on, probably lethargic from the current fullness of his stomach.

And there, just then, when he may have slipped into slumber even with her a throat-hold away, their attendant wrapped on the door to their compartment.

He jolted upright with a quick breath.

“You can’t stay up forever, you know,” she chided as she opened the door and greeted the porter, this time a younger and taller and duskier man.

Barnes just glowered silently in his seat. The train, gaining speed, emerged from the underground into the cityscape. 

“Yes...can we have the salmon dinner delivered here? Yes, just one with a side salad. We just filled up on brats and hamburgers. Right, Hon?” Natasha turned her attention back to her companion.

He shrugged. “Yeah. Sounds good.”

Natasha-Samantha smiled winningly back at the attendant. “Then the salmon. And a glass of white wine for me. A whiskey neat for him.”

As she closed and latched the door, she blankly asked. “You like whiskey, right?” She didn’t try to think of the taste of the liquor on his breath and in his mouth, nor the recollection of it intermingling with echoes of gunpowder and frost on his tongue.

“It’s the blended crap,” he remarked finally, digging through his backpack for his current reading. 

“Oh! A connoisseur!” she teased. “Well, don’t worry. We’ll find the good stuff when we step off. Promise.”

Buck looked over the spine of _The Martian_ at her, and all but his forehead and eyes obscured. He wasn’t reading the book, he was trying to read her instead.

“The Blackfeet have a legend that the Morning Star is the son of the Sun and the Moon,” she began, deciding the best thing to do was to unfold the small collapsing table and have her own seat across from him. Natasha gazed out the window at the urban blight and people’s backyards abutting the tracks. “He once loved a mortal woman and brought her to the heavens to be with him.”

“I know how this ends,” Barnes responded, glancing at her again before returning to his page.

“I never took you for a scholar in Native American lore.” 

“You don’t need that,” he explained, resolutely. “You just have to understand that nothing good lasts forever. The woman either dies or wants to be back home again or something.”

“Big ball of optimism, you are,” she remarked, dryly. 

He sighed, then asked without actually looking at her. “Why won’t you leave me alone?” He didn’t snap, quite, and didn’t raise his voice. He just seemed tired. 

“You contracted me to crack what you got from HYDRA,” she returned, sensing that something between them was going to break, with no clue how it would fracture. “That’s not going to happen if I can’t keep us clean. Don't you think I’d rather be sipping champagne on a Stark jet or helicopter, while JARVIS does all the heavy-lifting?”

“I don’t mean the jamming thing.” He leaned back his head, closed his eyes and his book. “I mean, why you insisted that I come with you? You could have taken the money and the drives and--”

“And what?!” Here it was. At least some truths would have to have their moment. “Let you get off at the next station with just a ‘thank you’ for handing me the intel the Avengers needed for months and the bribe -- and don’t fucking _fool_ yourself, Barnes, it is a bribe! -- that I won’t tell Steve?!”

Natasha watched him swallow, shaking his head briefly. The Black Widow and Natalia were warring now, bickering between her ears like she and him were bickering in this berth.

“Listen up, Sarge!” she continued, straightening herself in her chair. “Unless you are HYDRA’s agent, there are only three people on this planet that assume you are still alive after the Potomac. Rogers, Wilson, and me. We’ve kept it that way, because Sam is just about the most loyal person I know, and because I owe Steve a debt.”

It was the truth, but not the whole truth. She needed another bullet point in her ‘Reasons I’m Going Along With This’ impromptu presentation, with just enough veracity. “Even if I never told him I was doing it, Steve would _still_ want me to help you, in any way I could, without countering your freedom. You agreed to my terms. Does that make _any_ sense to you?”

She crossed her arms, looked out the window again. She waited to see how he would respond.

The man curled further into himself, and rested his elbows on his braced knees, and wove his long fingers through his ragged hair as he stared downward. “I asked you not to talk about Rogers,” he replied glumly.

Natasha pressed, feeling the righteousness that she usually left to Captain America to embody. “Tough shit this time, Barnes. And if anything I said about his motives seems uncharacteristic of your childhood friend and unit commander, then you can go ahead and call me a liar or anything worse. I’ve heard it all, in probably two-dozen languages, and your vocabulary is decidedly behind-the-times.”

She remained seated as Barnes chewed that through, waiting to see if he would bolt or call it all off. The train continued steady underneath. They were only probably fifteen or twenty minutes away from slowing and halting for another station.

He took another deep breath, hitching this time. With his head at this angle between his knees and folded arms, she couldn’t tell if he was, in fact, shedding silent tears.

“I told you,” he half-whispered. “I told you that I’m not what he thinks I am anymore.”

Natasha wanted to weep with James, to lift up his heavy skull in her own hands and press her forehead to his, consoling with touch those sentiments that words, however eloquent, could not communicate. That he was loved. That he, in whatever fractured form he was now and could ever return from, was still _loved._

But a few minutes of honesty did not earn them a lost lifetime. Still, she could expose herself. Her true self, and make it just a little more real.

Natasha observed her own fingertips tracing the contours of the table between them. “Then would you consider...just consider...that I may not be who you think I am, either?”


	16. Bucky

Bucky swallowed, keenly aware of the vibration of the train below him. Natasha was right, he supposed, about calling his patronage a bribe. He wanted to end HYDRA, true. He wanted the Avengers to have what he had uncovered in his own raids to assist that end. He just didn’t want to endanger them, especially Steve. Buck was, in some unarticulatable fashion, a living gunpowder keg. All it took was one match, one truth, and _boom_.

All he could do to try to get this across to his companion was force himself to whisper. “I told you that I’m not what he thinks I am anymore.”

Though he half-blocked his ears as his thoughts thundered around his cranium, Natasha’s words came through: “Then would you consider...just consider...that I may not be who you think I am, either?”

What did he know of Romanoff? She was Russian by birth. She had been trained in close-quarter fighting and traditional black ops skill-sets from a youth, and she was incredible at it all. She had been an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., before Pierce and Rumlow and the others were exposed as HYDRA and Project Insight was thwarted by her and Rogers and their allies. This was all in the press. This was taken as fact.

But the tabloids that did pieces on the Avengers suggested more. That Natasha was quite the spy. That she could be hired to do any deed for the right price. That she could beat any lie-detection device ever created. Manipulative and beautiful, spinning her webs as her code-name implied. Seductive and deadly and every ounce mimicking a black widow.

Buck heard Natasha lean back in her seat even though his eyes were cast down on the upholstery. “How about this one? When you approached Isaiah, what did he tell you about me?”

Isaiah Ross. Her broker. 

He tried to remember back to when he had found the skinny man. He recalled something about Ross’ special client only taking contracts against the corrupt, even if the job was for an only slightly less corrupt client.

“You’re picky about what you take on,” he summarized as he willed himself to lift and turn his head across his knee to glance at her. “But willing to do almost anything to see the contract met, once you do.”

Natasha drew up her own legs on her small perch. “And why do you think that is?”

“You’re an Avenger,” he stated plainly. “You’re helping keep this stupid planet kicking and breathing. Sometimes you do what Captain America can’t. You and that Hawk-Guy.”

Natasha scoffed, turning towards their window. “Hawk _eye_ ,” she emphasized. “And Clint’s more of a marksman-assassin kind of operative than a deep cover man.” She then glanced at him through the corner of her eye briefly. “Kinda like you.”

As the Winter Soldier, he had viewed Agent Romanoff’s dossier in preparation for eliminating her and a few details of that surfaced to his memory.

“You’re lovers,” Buck stated, disliking having skimmed a sleazy gossip magazine to find that bit of speculation. “You shared an apartment in D.C.”

“If I gave you the truth,” she spoke to the passing scenery, “would you actually believe it?”

Buck tried for a few heartbeats to very seriously consider her last question and the previous twenty-four hours with her. The question had a weight to it, its own importance. If he lied, perhaps she’d open up more about her plans…

“I don’t know,” he answered finally. The fog of exhaustion was starting to catch up to him.

“Well,” she returned more to the oblong window than to him. “Then, I guess, I’m only what you believe that I am.”

Bucky thought to reach back for his book. He was nearly at the end, and he could try to use its fictional action as the stranded Watney attempted to rendezvous with the Hermes crew in space to keep himself alert.

He shouldn’t have looked again at Natasha, but he did. She rested her chin on her own knees, watching the midwestern plains opening to them. He realized he had likely hurt her with his suspicion, and how lies could be both frightening attractive and horribly isolating. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, stupidly, as if it would make anything better. 

“I wish you wouldn’t tell me that,” she replied, rightfully. It was one of the first things she demanded on the train from New York City.

How did the saying go, about fair play?

Bucky did take up his reading, but not before replying to a random page and to her. “Tough shit, Romanoff.”

“Asshole,” she accused casually. Her feet at least touched the floor again.

He couldn’t help his curiosity. “So this Hawkeye and you?”

Natasha left her seat to find a space with him on the couch, sitting half-sideways to face her companion.

Buck waited, flipping through the pages of his book to find his place again. With her, he was learning, it was often about giving her time to think through and weigh the pros and cons about what she was willing to reveal. Through occasional glances, he caught how she closed her eyes, as if to better concentrate or to relive the past.

“I was in a real bad place,” she began. “I had just given up on having anything good in my life ever, after promises of just that for years. So on this one mission for my old handlers, I was careless. Purposefully. I just wanted it -- me -- to be done and over.”

“But that didn’t happen?” he inquired, feeling the wrenching in his gut that he had, and perhaps still continued to, desire the same ending.

“No.” She took a deep breath. “The thing about Barton...little gets past him. He saw what a wreck I was, even as he was sent by S.H.I.E.L.D. to neutralize me. He didn’t go through with his orders. He gave me an escape, even though it wasn’t the kind I was looking for. He invited me to come over to his side. And even though I accepted, I was still messed up for a while. I don’t know if it was because I was thankful, or lonely, or just couldn’t figure out whether the new situation would last once Clint took me to Director Fury, but I did my best to make him my lover.”

He didn’t bother anymore pretending to read his book. Buck knew it was pretty nosy if not rude to ask anyone about their private life if it wasn’t volunteered. Assuming that Black Widow could have anyone she set her sights on was the safe bet. Yet, it wasn’t where her story was leading.

“He didn’t fall for it?” Buck asked.

“Not one bit, for many reasons that aren’t mine to tell.” She smiled slightly. “But we’ve kept up those appearances up to everyone but the other Avengers and a few of the Tower staff. When Barton and I were with S.H.I.E.L.D., it deterred agents like Grant Ward from treating me like a conquest.”

_From across a dirty table surrounded by a few shadowy others, a dark-haired man with prominent cheekbones, no older than perhaps his mid-twenties pushed a photograph towards the Soldier. “This is your target. Due into port in sixteen hours, escorted by a lone field agent,” he spoke in Russian. The man leaned back in his chair, narrowing his eyes as he appraised HYDRA’s asset. “I’d do it myself, but the American arm wants my cover intact. Time to see if you actually live up to that legend or whether you’re just a rusting Soviet relic.”_

The memory caught Buck by surprise.

“When I was…” The familiar guilt washed over him.”...I may have met Agent Ward.”

Natasha squared her shoulders and frowned. “How long ago?”

Bucky tried to think of anything else, any other detail. “I don’t remember exactly. He was a looker. Spoke Russian incredibly well. An ego the size of a Macy’s--” He tried to finish his comparison, and drew another blank when memory could only half-connect with words. “Anyway. I must have overheard someone else use his name.”

“Ward was on a classified, long-term assignment when S.H.I.E.L.D. collapsed,” Natasha filled in. “Maria Hill's trying to apprehend him, but he's gone underground. I’d call him extremely dangerous. Maybe whatever intel you acquired will help us track him down again.” Perhaps she wasn't treating him as a mole after all. Disclosure for disclosure, trust for trust.

“That’d be nice,” he muttered, his tongue thick in his mouth. It had been...what?...three or four days since his last real sleep.

Natasha plucked _The Martian_ from him, stowing it away in a small pocket near the couch. “Our dinner won’t be here for another hour. And even though you don’t take anyone’s orders, I’m telling you to get some kip like I was your CO.”

Her use of British slang reminded him of Roger’s English brown-eye’d sweetheart. Buck supposed if he was going to sleep, thoughts of Peggy Carter in a red dress and heels or in her battle fatigues and boots wouldn’t be bad to linger on. A dame like her came around only once every generation.

Buck settled his pack behind his head as a makeshift pillow as he reclined. "Yes, Ma'am," he agreed, sounding to himself like an echo or a scratched but beloved record.

Through his drooping lashes, he watched as Natasha rose and found her purse with the borrowed book. She pulled close the shades on their window to give him a little twilight in which to rest, then flipped on a spot reading light focused on the single chair at their small table.

What was it about the half-dark that softened her face? It was futile to guess.

Bucky took in a deep, slow breath and turned onto his side and his back to the suite. He closed his eyes.

In his drowsiness, he speculated that if the archer wasn’t Romanoff’s lover, who was? Perhaps no one. It was none of his business whom she gave her affections to or not, genuine or false. Yet his idiotic interest felt no more abated by her confession.

Why was it that every answer she gave begged three more questions?

_Over the cathedral radio, his sisters’ heads bowed around it, the stately cadence of a British official’s address: ‘I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. She is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost had this one out for the 4th of July. Ah, well. Enjoy.


	17. Natasha

From her seat in their cabin, Natasha studied Barnes as he turned his back and attempted slumber on the couch, still with his boots on. The urge to tell him more about the Red Room dwindled. She could never truly be sure of it all.

Natasha probably shouldn’t have revealed as much as she did, but she had done so anyway out of instinct. Two instincts, to be exact. The instinct of her heart wishing to jar something loose in him. The instinct of her spy-self to trade a small confession, a tiny bit of disclosure, for a bit of connection.

Yes. Everything she revealed had been the truth. It still had the taste of manipulation.

Barnes had stated he wasn’t the person Steve remembered. She, evolved and honed over the years, may be in just the same predicament he accused himself of.

Natasha’s silently cursed as her eyes stung as she listened to him sigh and perhaps actually fall asleep as she had suggested.

Complete the contract. Hack the drives. Get the money. Pay the bills. That was practical. That is what the Widow required to maintain independence. That is what kept Isaiah Ross willing to represent and risk her.

Offer Barnes sanctuary. Convince him to face Steve on his own terms. Those were purely emotional. Costly. Remember her? With no-one’s gold found at the end, it was simply a fairytale.

She couldn’t even call Clint about this. Clint, who had reminded her enough of the Soldier -- the accent, the marksmanship skills, the kindness of someone who had another life beyond missions and death-dealing -- that she, broken and full of self-loathing, ran as far away from the Red Room as she could get. 

_’Run, Natalia!’_

_’I won’t leave you. Not ever.’_

But she did finally escape. The Madame had not retaliated. Natasha couldn’t face going back, even if it was to hunt down and destroy the organization that crafted her and other female operatives. She had survived it once, and the Avengers needed her more than she needed to destroy herself with such a quest.

Natasha chewed briefly at her own tongue. The bitterness within in her mouth was a chemical-tasting regret. For all she knew, her defection had caused the shutdown of the program when the Kremlin found out their greatest weapon could not be controlled.

It had to be enough, she thought. It must be enough.

Barnes’ probe about her relationship with Clint was the only good thing about their tense conversation. He cared enough, for whatever reason probably having to do with Samantha and Zach’s pretend romance, to want some sort of insight into her real connections. Soon, she guessed, he would find a way to ask about what she felt about the other Avengers. Maybe, given the right circumstances, even about Steve. What would she confess then?

She reminded herself not to lay down track to where the train may never go. 

Natasha finally found her place in _To Kill a Mockingbird_. The story was from the viewpoint of a girl but featured her older brother, a boy with high standards and expectations of people. As the story was set in the Great Depression, she wondered if it had sparked anything in Bucky about his childhood. More importantly, she was curious if the reading had shook loose anything about Steve. 

Natasha had glimpsed at the journal he kept when she found him spaced-out in one of the coach seating cars before pulling him out. Thank you, Sam Wilson.

For Bucky Barnes, Memory Lane was more like Memory Minefield. The Red Room Academy...their missions...how would he find his way through all those awful recollections to recall Natalia and _not_ be crippled by even more self-loathing than what he already carried?

She couldn’t hurt him like that. Once had been enough.

Still, perhaps after dinner, she could convince Barnes to play some more poker with her. Even Gin Rummy or Crazy Eights may give him a small taste of his gentler youth back.

* * *

Hours later, as her companion and herself picked over their shared meal, Barnes made a confession. “There are others that know I’m alive,” he said glumly, more to his half-drained whiskey glass than to her.

“Who?” she asked plainly, setting her fork down on the plate.

“Two of the technicians in D.C.. The ones that…” He was having trouble finding words and swallowed. “...maintained me. I went back to where Pierce housed me. I couldn’t...not anymore.”

“They surrendered,” Natasha responded, wishing that he could accept more comfort. “President Ellis himself made a statement, promising leniency for anyone working for HYDRA or S.H.I.E.L.D. to give themselves up to the authorities for questioning. They needed to sort it all out.”

He winced, then looked out the window. “So the whole of the FBI.”

“No.” She sighed, continuing. “Colonel Rhodes had the clearance to get Cap their transcripts along with a whole bunch of other HYDRA cronies. Steve, Sam, and I looked at them. They don’t mention you returning after the Potomac, only running after Rumlow didn’t return with you.”

“Small mercies,” he whispered, almost inaudibly over the noise of the moving train.

“Perhaps they think you’d come for them if they tattled,” she speculated. “Perhaps the fuckers remembered their humanity when you remembered yours.”

“Where are they now?”

“As far as I know? Minimum security prison, somewhere upstate.”

He clenched his jaw, finally locking eyes with her. “A loose end I shouldn’t have dropped.” His eyes were suddenly glassy.

Natasha was full and frustrated of having to keep her emotional distance. “You are _not_ the Winter Soldier anymore. You get that, right?”

“But, then, who am I?” he asked her, bowing his head and closing his eyes. A single tear threatened to fall down his cheek before he reached to scrub it away with his left hand.

That was it. She couldn’t sit and pretend that she only cared for him as Steve’s long-lost friend.

She rose from her seat quickly, took the two steps to the small medicine cabinet to retrieve the jamming device and her sunglasses, and before he could ask anything, she took his metal wrist in her hand. “You’re coming with me. Now.”

His face went from shadowed to confused, rising rather than outright refusing. “I need to get my--”

“Leave it,” she ordered as with the other hand she tucked the device into a pocket of his cargo pants and slipped on her sunglasses. Then she tried not to order, but ask. “Just try leaving it behind for a little while? I’ll do the same.”

He swallowed and tensed and allowed himself to be half-dragged through the opening door. “Alright,” he finally agreed.

Natasha released him only to secure their compartment behind them. She switched her grip to take his right hand, palm-to-palm. She lead him down the hall of the double-decker and towards the rear of the train, passing through another sleeping car and a coach car to their destination.

He kept up with her strides and when she smiled softly back to him, he looked now more curious than concerned.

She glanced out of one of the windows, thinking their timing would be near perfect.

“Almost there,” she promised as she opened the door to the diaphragm. On one side of the next car’s door read ‘Lounge’.

She slowed as they entered that car, allowing him his first look of the space.

The lounge car on their route was called a Sightseer for a reason. The topmost tall and wide windows of the two banks of glass curved upwards, providing an open view of the Wisconsin-to Minnesota landscape. The seats all faced outwards, for better viewing of the acres and acres of middle-America passing, washed in the deepening light of a sun dipping towards the horizon, fractured light mixing with the soft shadows of layering clouds.

Barnes-Sheridan craned his neck around. She plucked the fold of twenties from where she knew he kept them in a rear pocket, sliding them out with a pickpocket’s feather touch. She held it up for him, so to try to signal she wasn’t being duplicitous.

“Find us a couch on the left side, would you? Gonna be quite the show.”

She went to the bar and returned to find him leaning on the edge of one of the two-seater couches, his hands laced together and pressing on his mouth, his elbows on his knees. He peeled his eyes away from the view to her. Over the seat, she passed him a whiskey-neat. 

“Aren’t you going to sit down?” he asked, taking the glass.

“In a little bit. If you sit back, you can pretend I’m one of those poker hostesses.” She smiled slyly, taking a half-step further behind for better access to his shoulders.

He blinked, a frown twitching on the edges of his mouth before he stalled by taking a long sip on his drink.

“I’d rather you just be you,” he finally responded as he settled down deeper into the chair, in reach of her hands. “Samantha.” He stated her name slowly, as if to clarify exactly whose invitation he was accepting. His words still caused her a little flutter in her stomach.

She started with his right shoulder (there wasn’t much use in trying to work on his left), being slow and superficial at first. As gentle as she was, he was still holding his breath and, through the faint reflection in the almost crystal clear glass, she noticed him keeping his eyes shut. Who could guess what was going through his head?

‘Screw HYDRA’ was in hers. 

“You can breathe. The sunset’s just starting.” she coaxed softly, hoping it didn’t sound too authoritarian.

He did finally exhale and inhale. It took him longer to open his eyes to enjoy what flat land and open skies at dusk had to offer the passengers. Blues and purples, glowing oranges and reds. Natasha would never be a poet, but she memorized the words of one who was.

As she worked up to the curve of his neck, kneading and stroking, she recited. “'Splendor of ended day floating and filling me. Hour prophetic…'” She skipped a line but doubted Barnes would notice. “'Inflating my throat, you divine average. You earth and life till the last ray gleams, I sing.'”

The man below her took the last of his drink and sighed, folding his fingers into one another around the empty glass in his lap. Her companion’s muscles and tendons began loosening up. Eventually, his head tilted back as he scanned that splendor before the twilight of his lashes.

Natasha kept a half eye out. She noticed a lone, middle-aged woman two seats down on the right with some sort of small watercolor set, sketching and painting the very-same panorama. The woman looked up and down constantly to the view and then to her postcard-sized work, trying to capture the fleeting detail with her palette. 

Observant, their fellow passenger soon winked and smiled to Natasha, mouthing ‘Walt Whitman’ silently while giving a thumbs up with her brush in hand.

Samantha wrinkled her nose and smiled back. The man under her didn’t seem to catch the small exchange.

She couldn’t help but feel the ragged ends of his hair brush over her knuckles now.

Natalia lusted.

“I could go further,” she invited. “Rub your scalp a while.”

“Sure,” he returned, drowsily. One or two drinks did not, by themselves, alter his judgment. So she took it as his consent to entwine her fingers into the roots of his brown locks at the base of his neck.

As she caressed his hair the curve of his spine arched slightly, pressing his head deeper into her hands. His gaze went from the most perfect view up to the darkening sky. He didn’t quite look at her, but she could see how his pupils expanded.

Natasha was playing with fire, the bare excuse to pleasure him in order to dance with her beloved ghost.

She had to stop.

She didn’t stop, lacing her fingers through the strands again and again, massaging his scalp, knowing the scent of him and his shampoo would be on her hands for hours if she didn’t wash them.

Even though the sun had dipped below the horizon, the orb still offered up refracted light that played in the atmosphere for some time before the night made its own claim.

“Better?” she finally asked, speaking lowly.

“Yeah,” he drawled. “Better.”

She finally sat down next to him on the empty seat to his right, tearing her sunglasses off. “Pretty awesome vacation so far,” she remarked for her cover and herself and him.

He scoffed, but raised his arm and shifted, opening his right side to draw her closer, as a real boyfriend would do. Zach, she figured, wasn’t into many displays of affection. This was a good as she’d get. She leaned and settled against him, his arm wrapping around her shoulders.

In her ear: “What are you doing with me?”

Was he accusing her of something? Some tactic?

“What do you mean?” she replied, her head nestled in the crux of his shoulder. A non-answer. A spy’s answer. He had to recognize it.

“I mean…” His gloved finger tapped against his empty glass. “What’s a woman like you doing with a loser like me?”

Zach then. Or at least mostly.

She bantered. “Well...you have no sense of humor. No stable income. No friends.”

He almost laughed.

“Horribly tragic back-story.”

“Oh, now you’re just making fun,” he remarked.

She sighed and closed her eyes. “But you’ve been through shit that would have left most people broken or mean. Or...dead. And yeah, you’re scarred. But there’s a goodness to you that none of that ever erased. Could ever erase.” Natasha slid her hand over his chest, feeling his heartbeat. “I just wish...I just want you to believe it.”

And maybe through Zach, Bucky could.

They were silent on that couch for some time before he sighed. “I’d like to stay here forever, but we’ve a couple of berths waiting.”

She pulled herself away, feeling the cool, circulated air of the train come between them. He stood and gave his glass back to the bartender.

This time he lead the way. They didn’t hold hands.


	18. Bucky

Buck paused on the way back to their cabin to use one of the larger, more private toilets available to the passengers, handing Natasha back her device so she would not have to be concerned about him tampering with it. Everyone’s shit stunk, even that of super-soldiers, and he wanted to take a few minutes to put his head back together again after what he just experienced in the lounge car.

They may have been playing their covers, but he only had one body.

The way she had touched him -- soothingly, kindly, with just a hint of intimacy -- as if it was the most natural thing in the world, sent him into a mental tailspin.

He, who had no recollection of anyone touching the Soldier except to perform some medical procedure or to attack or defend themselves against him, had melted into her caresses. Buck had let himself surrender to her offer because, in the company of strangers, he wasn’t really James Buchanan Barnes at all. He was Zachary Sheridan, and Zach would have liked the way she eased out his physical tensions, invited him to feel cherished.

Buck had tried to challenge her motives, but retreated back almost as soon as she was nestled up against him like any couple would enjoying a sunset together. Natasha-Samatha showed no signs of being repulsed by his prosthetic.

_’There’s a goodness in you that none of that ever erased.’_

He didn’t feel good. He felt a little dizzy and a great deal confused.

Romanoff was a master manipulator. Maybe she saw how he had started falling apart over their dinner and seized that moment to--

To what?

First the baseball game. Then later that day being given a backrub and more to the sight of a sunset. Normal things normal people enjoyed.

A vacation….a vacation from himself? 

Well, that was an odd thought, but one that may just be perfectly reasonable to a person like Natasha.

That answer and cold water on his face helped him get his internal balance back.

In less than twenty-four hours they would disembark. And maybe, after that, she and he would just drop these personas and get on with the business of cracking those encrypted files. If he needed that glorious sensation again of someone stroking fingers through his hair as he remained fully clothed, he supposed there were odder things that johns paid for.

Natasha had waited just outside the bathroom, leaned up against the wall beside the door, twirling her sunglasses lazily on her finger.

She motioned with her hand as if to gesture ‘after you.’

When they got back to their room, Buck found that in their absence, their train attendant had taken away their half-eaten dinner and installed the sheets and pillows on the now-converted couch and upper-berth. The window shades had also been drawn.

In a panic, he immediately located his backpack, knowing the porter had to move it to make the beds. Beyond his notebooks and the drives and the cash, he had weapons and a few explosive devices tucked within its many pockets. He shouldn’t have left any of it out of his sight, ‘vacation’ or not. It was too dangerous, too much of a chance of getting caught--

“Is everything there?” his companion asked, reinstalling the jammer-compact in the cabinet.

“I’m not leaving this again,” he growled, although nothing inside seemed disturbed.

“There’s places to secure everything once we reach our destination.”

“Doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have risked it. Carelessness like this--”

“Gets one killed,” she finished, drawing out the blue shirt he had loaned her from where she had rolled it up and put it in her purse earlier that morning. “I know. It took me a few years to stop thinking about survival every waking minute when I wasn’t on an op.”

Buck wasn’t in the mood to be asked to imagine a different life for himself once more this evening. “Unlike you, I’m not living in Stark’s fancy tower with its fancy security to have that luxury.” He set down the backpack to also check his duffle and get out another set of cleanish clothes to sleep in.

Natasha scoffed as she set her own night-clothes on top of her bunk and went to the sink. “It’s not all glitterati and glory, Barnes. With the exception of Christmas Eve, some of us haven’t taken a day off that wasn’t medically ordered since those helicarriers came out of the sky.” And by ‘some of us’, she meant Steve. Bucky knew she did.

“By God, you’re a pill!” he snipped, which only caused her brows to lift and a brief quirk of a smile before she turned away from him. “I thought you were better at figuring out when a person’s no longer interested in the current conversation.”

She waved her toothbrush in the air. “Oh, I detected that before we left the lounge car. And I’ll leave you alone for the rest of the night.” She turned on the tap. “Still doesn’t make what I’ve said any less true.”

He backed down a little. “I just want a few more hours of sleep. That’s all.”

Natasha spat in the sink and rinsed out her mouth again with a sip of bottled water. “You’ll have that,” she vowed to the mirror as she wiped off her make-up. “Nothing much to do on a train but eat, sleep, read, and enjoy the ride.” Or fall a thousand feet to one’s presumed death.

Buck decided he’d just stick to the first three on her list until they pulled into Browning, Montana.

* * *

Crack!-Ting!

_Buck felt a small thrill of satisfaction as he pumped the Winchester .22 that was braced against his shoulder, waiting till another one of the cycling metal rabbit targets came into his sight. He had only one more chance._

Crack!-Ting! _The bunny flipped down after a solid shot._

 _Behind him a woman squealed happily and clapped as he set down the rifle on the gallery counter and waited for the other shooters to finish. “Bucky, you’re_ amazing! _”_

_The crowds of the boardwalk at near-dusk were a blur as they meandered past the attractions, while she, a young woman with styled copper-bright curls and freckles and oh-so-red lips beamed like a lighthouse in the sea of strangers._

_“Alright! All right, Gentlemen!” the dark-haired barker called as he passed out tokens. “Come get your reee-ward!”_

_He swooped it up off the counter and held it between them. “Here you go, doll,” he offered the stamped coin to her. “Go get yourself something cute while I find Steve. We’ll be near the water.”_

_“Sure thing!” She didn’t run away to the prize booth until she bounced on her heels and gave Bucky a quick peck on the cheek. There was a very good chance she’d give him more than that before their evening was through. If the barkers had their plays, so did he. Take a ride on the Ferris wheel, wrap his arm around her shoulders..._

_Buck couldn’t help but grin as he ambled down the boardwalk to where a reedy young man was sitting alone on a bench, looking over the sandy shoreline at the impending sunset. His thin fingers were stained with a rainbow of pastels._

 _“So how’s it going?” Steve asked, not looking up from his artwork._

_“With Dot? Swell and grand,” he concluded. “Shame she’s going back to Boston next week.” He sat down beside his friend. “Hey, wanna ride the Atom Smasher with us?”_

_Steve laughed good-naturedly as he continued drawing. “And have a repeat of the Cyclone incident of ‘36? I don’t think so. Wouldn’t want to ruin your date. Besides, all I have left is our train money. Which, I remind you, you asked me to keep safe.”_

_Dolores found them, no prize in hand. “Oh, Buck!” she started, leaning over the back of the bench to croon closer to his ear. “They have this really adorable bear in a Dodgers’ uniform, but I need another twelve tokens to get him.” She then looked down at the sunset scene Steve was working on. “That’s really beautiful,” she admired sincerely._

_Buck sighed forlornly and turned his head to his friend. Steve looked up and caught his eye, the unspoken plea on his face. Without saying a word, the skinny man fished for his thinner wallet, pulling out two dollar bills and handing them over._

_“I owe you!” Bucky said, rising and smiling broadly. The prospects of the night had greatly improved. His arm wrapped around Dot’s waist as he pulled her close to him to head back to the gallery. “I really owe you, pal!”_

_If he was a perfect shot, he’d have enough money for her bear_ and _two tickets on the Ferris wheel. They’d figure out how to get back to Brooklyn eventually. Between he and Steve, they always came up with something to get themselves out of a pickle._

_As Bucky took up the pre-loaded rifle from the shooting gallery’s barker in exchange for his 25 cents, he turned to his date. “Kiss for good luck, darlin’?” In her excitement, Dot didn’t play coy, but took his jaw in her hands and full-on pressed her painted lips to his. The thrill of it made him briefly heady._

_“Gentlemen! Gentlemen! The round’s about to begin!”_

_He willed himself to focus. A steeled and icy discipline, that was what he needed for the perfect shot._

_“We’ll finish this later,” Bucky promised with a wink as soon as her mouth retreated from his. He took his stance and squared up to the myriad of moving and static shapes, all worth a different amount of points. The profile of an Indian chief’s head was worth 100 in and of itself. He sighted down at the war-bonnetted face, considered it as his first casualty, then swallowed back his unease and changed his mind._

_“Here we go! Wait for the sound of the starting gong, fellas!”_

Bong! _It had begun._

_A two-dimensional duck, advancing from right to left on a looping conveyor-belt was Buck’s first casualty. One rabbit on the spinning wheel his second. He hadn’t been his high school’s rifle team captain for nothing. He’d win it all._

_‘Very good_ Soldat _. Continue.’_

_A chill caught him. But nevermind. He wouldn’t lose his concentration._

_The rifle in his hands suddenly felt heavier, the barrel longer. He compensated by slowing down, taking more time with his aim on...on a simple bulls-eye. Fine. It was weirdly far away, a hundred yards, but no matter. He had a scope to aid him._

_The hard crack, the sound of thunder following. The round sunk deep into the yellow. The metallic taste. The promise of peace._

_‘Continue.’_

_He had a full magazine and no need to manually reload. This was a true weapon, and he and it were one._

_A human silhouette appeared from out of a shadow. A squeeze of the trigger. Done. Many others not far behind. All those other faceless souls, too, fell easily to his rounds._

_‘Two targets. Level six. They already cost me Zola.’_

_He pivoted around. The redhead then, first. The one that was once by his side. She, not the chiefs of nations, was worth the most points in the entire game; the real challenge._

_‘Step right up! Step right up! Try your skill. Five shots per quarter. Five shots! How about you, sir?! Impress the lady, sir! Impress the lady!’_

_He took his time stalking his human prey, even though panicked others came between them for mere moments in the chaos. Beach-goers? Bureaucrats? He paid them no mind. Her red hair waved like a flag as she ran. He lined up the shot and squeezed--_

_The concussive ‘boom’ and roar. The recoil kicking at his shoulder._

_She crumpled next to another body, but she wasn’t dead. He drew in closer to use his pistol instead, dropping the rifle and striding down the narrow, concrete-pebbled beach to where she lay. The low sun was turning everything to crimson and gold._

_The waves swirled with her blood. The woman writhed and turned on her back, copper locks plastered to her pale face, obscuring her features. Her full lips were blue as she stared up at him._

_No. Not Dolores from Boston. She was somehow another prize, a greater prize._ His _prize. She was all that was longed for._

_‘Zelaniye.'_

_The word echoed in his skull. He gasped, his legs suddenly weak. He tingled everywhere. He clenched closed his eyes, tried to shake the frailty off, trying to fight off-- No! Fight_ for... 

_‘Zhavvoy.'_

_He fell to his knees._

_The blood was clotting all around him now. The key to his rusting heart’s chambers would no longer turn. Locked away from himself. Memories leaking through him like holes through an abandoned tin can..._

_“Stop!” he cried, desperate to end the horror. “STOP!” Instead of his target’s head, he turned the barrel of his pistol to his own. Better to die than to---_

_“Listen to me,” the wounded woman below him choked out, lifting up her trembling fingers to his wrist, trying with whatever strength she had left to pull the pistol down from under his chin. “It’s alright.”_

_“N-no. You’re dying...you’re dead,” he countered. “I’ve killed you! I’ll kill...”_

_“You’ve got to wake up now, Barnes.”_

_“I’m-- I’m--”_

_“For fuck’s sake, wake_ up! _”_

_A large wave, building and cresting, crashed onto the beach. The brine splashed into his mouth and eyes. He sputtered, at loss for breath, finally gasping--_

\-- and hit his head on something solid as he jolted awake, somewhere in a semi-dark and confined space. 

His heart was beating wildly as he heaved for more air, trying to make sense of where he was. There was a low-level vibration beneath him. Soaked bedclothes, wet with more than sweat, half-twisted around his legs and torso. A narrow bunk above. Drops of water fell from his hair and nose, as if he had just had taken a cool shower.

A lithe, feminine figure, pressed into the farthest corner of the darkened room, held a small pistol at him in one hand and a mostly-empty plastic water bottle in the other. She was in nothing but an overly-big shirt. One of _his_ shirts.

They were both on a passenger train, in some sort of private sleeper room.

Natasha Romanoff. Pointing a gun at him. Concerned he would…? Buck remained still, letting present reality reassert itself in his head as his pulse slowed.

“You?” he asked, finally realizing she had been the source of his dousing.

“You were shouting. You seemed upset,” Natasha responded. She kept the thing aimed at him but withdrew her finger from the trigger. “Right now, I need you to tell me your name.”

He was briefly confused, then realized that she had no idea in what mental state he was in and was testing him. He took a deep breath and thought to the first revelations. “James Buchanan Barnes. Um...Bucky.” She knew him as something different though, he remembered. “ I’ve got some kind of alias, too.” He chose his words carefully. “We’re goin' west. To somewhere you’ll start working on those HYDRA files I stole.”

“What did we have for dessert at dinner?” she then asked. “Can you remember?”

“M'head's not worth much, really.” At her raised eyebrow, he sighed ran his hands through his half-soaked hair, trying to piece together what had happened before he had risked getting some sleep and had his night-time slumber invaded with more of his brutal decades as the Winter Soldier. “Unless you count that whiskey at sunset, we didn’t have dessert.”

Natasha finally lowered her pistol. “Good enough.” She only eased herself a little away from her defensive position, taking up the single chair. The safety engaged, she set it down on the small leaf table within her reach along with the water bottle.

The events of D.C. was raw now in his mind, hinting at more than mere footage. The recollection of how he had stalked her. The detached way he stared her down in his scope to shoot her and leave her for dead was now too easy for him to recall. The dream had twisted that day with the older recollection, he figured, his youthful hedonism mated with a killer’s instincts.

His companion seemed content to simply continue to observe him. He could barely meet her in the eye. What the hell does one say to someone you almost murdered?

“What time is it?” He finally asked, becoming aware of just how uncomfortable the damp bedding and clothing was.

“About three a.m., I think,” she answered. “The hour of the wolf.”

He clenched his jaw, pushing away his sheets. “I’m not going back to sleep.”

She shrugged. “Then how about a shower? And after that a cup of coffee. It’ll help clear your head.”

Buck couldn’t help but look straight at her. “Then you’ll put the gun away?” Whatever ‘away’ meant. Certainly, she wouldn’t keep it visible for long, because of the illegality of her having the pistol on the train at all. But the Black Widow hadn’t lived by being careless when in the presence of a considerable danger.

“Yeah,” Natasha agreed. She seemed so solemn and serious, like she wasn’t up to her usual quips and teasing. “Then you might want to figure out if there was anything that surfaced tonight that you want to write down or talk out. While it’s fresh.”’

Bucky stood and reached for his duffle. She knew, then, about what he was doing with those notebooks. “It was an awful dream, it didn’t make much sense.” In truth, he didn’t _want_ to try to untangle the horrors, dissect them for any truth. He’d rather forget and move on. “No,” he finally decided, finding the clothes he would wear today after his shower.

She didn’t counter him. “Your choice.” 

“I won’t be long,” he told her, looking forward, at least a little, to scrubbing himself of the salt-water-blood turned drinking water.


	19. Natasha

It started with the noise of him shifting again and again upon the bed below her.

Natasha peered over the edge at him, finding his brow scrunched and his mouth tensed and frowning, still in his sleep.

Barnes whimpered and the bleary plea of “stop” passed through his lips once then twice. His bionic arm whirred as it tensed, sending a jolt of fear into her gut.

That is when Natasha made the call and snatched her gun from her purse. It could never be certain, his state of mind. She vaulted off of her bunk to snatch the water bottle near the sink and unscrew the cap with her teeth.

Spitting the thing out on the floor, Natasha tried to reach out with her voice. “Listen to me. It’s alright.” What awful things was he dreaming? Was there anything of their connection left within him in the labyrinthine links within his brain?

“No! I…K--k...” Bucky muttered unintelligibly in slumber. His face twitched from defiance to despair.

“You’ve got to wake up now. Barnes!” 

He didn’t.

So she just up and doused him with one final order, not knowing which version of him she’d find him caught up in. At least staring down her barrel would give anyone of them pause long enough to re-orient to the present.

When Bucky asked the time of night, Natalia couldn’t help herself. “About three a.m, I think. The hour of the wolf.”

She observed as her companion did nothing to respond to that subtle cue. One nightmare couldn’t make miracles. 

As Natasha remained in her seat, her small pistol only a few inches away from her grasp, she watched in the shadows as Bucky entered the shower and discretely tossed his sleeping clothes onto the floor before sealing himself fully within as their train continued westbound. 

When the noise of running water began, she took up Samantha’s purse from where she had dropped it just minutes ago, and took out the bundle that was her sundress, her one bra, and her thigh holster.

She dressed hastily, taking the time now to consider how she had gone about awakening him. If it had been years ago -- when he muttered, tossed, and shuddered over the half-surfacing of another life or flashes of what HYDRA had done to enslave him -- she would have rubbed his good shoulder, called out to him in soothing words, and held him fiercely as he came to consciousness. But that option, as rare as it had been back then, was quite certainly off the table now. For with no memory of her came none of the visceral instinct of safety.

What had he dreamt? He refused to say. Even to write it down. It must have been painful. She just wanted…

Under her breath, she reminded Natalia-within that “It’s gone. Done. Over.” Not that she’d listen to her selves for longer than a few hours. She slid the pistol away under the frills of her dress.

With her sandals slipped on, she risked leaving Barnes alone with the jamming device in order to take two paper cups of coffee from the sleeper car’s drink station, counting on the shower would drown out her departure and return.

By the time he had cut off the water, she had flipped on the lights and stripped the soaked bedding off of the lower berth and tossed it on top of her own bunk, saving her single dry pillow. It would be simple to come up with an excuse to the attendant.

When Bucky came out of the shower, she was nose-deep into her loaned book rather than gawk at him in the towel about his waist and bare torso. Still, from the corner of her eye, she saw the silver flashes of his left arm, the angry seam of scar tissue, the otherwise near-perfect physique of his kind. Super-Soldiers. 

Barnes’ own single scan of the space gave him a deepening scowl. He turned away to snatch up his change of clothes to go back into the privacy of the steamy box to change. In a few minutes, he emerged dressed in cargo pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. The socks and glove and boots were the finality of his covered extremities.

He took his coffee cup and sat back down on the denuded bed. Took a testing sip, and then another, but didn’t say anything. 

Natasha offered: “I didn’t know how you liked it.”

“It’s fine,” he replied. “Black is fine.”

“You’re upset, still,” she observed, setting down her book.

Barnes sighed and turned his gaze almost automatically to a window that was still shaded. “You left. To get the coffee and whatever else.”

“I don’t put anyone in danger needlessly. There’s civilians on vacation just twelve feet from us in another compartment.” She drummed her fingertips on the fold-out table. “And I’m here to _help_ you, not rob you. We’re here to help each other. We figured that out, right?”

“For Rogers,” Bucky acknowledged her story again, glumly.

“For Steve,” Natasha confirmed as the half-truth. After another small silence when they both took another long drink, she asked, “So, do you want to talk about him now?” His dream could have very well been about her fellow Avenger. 

He looked down at his own hand around his steaming cup. “Does he have anyone?”

Natasha couldn’t allow herself to dwell long on the question. “Like a fuck-buddy?” she quipped, hoping the vulgarness would set him aback. She knew the tabloids made the Avengers into one big, carefree orgy this month and then a jealousy-driven tangle the next.

“Like..a…” Barnes stalled, then shrugged, looking up at her. “Like a sweetheart?”

“So you care?” she returned, questioning his motive behind the inquiry.

His storm-blue eyes got a far away look. “He was so scrawny for so long. No woman would bank on him, and he was too proud and poor to go to the dance halls and pay his dime.”

“You remember a lot, then.” The frustration threatened to shove the truth out of her mouth, but she wasn’t a world-class spy for nothing. “More than you let on.”

“And you haven’t answered.” He half shrugged then drowned about half his coffee in a few gulps. “Forget it. I should know better, Ms. Romanoff. Sorry for being nosy.”

She snipped back. “Now who’s being a pill?”

He owned it. He locked eyes on her. “I’m more terrible than that.”

The stared each other down for another long silence. Two killers with consciences. Alike more than they were different. She could not deny him his interest, finally, in Steve’s emotional well-being.

“I doubt he’s a virgin anymore, if that’s what you’re asking,” Natasha answered, obscuring her own part in that state of affairs. “But believing you’re drifting in the world, alone? He can’t swallow having anything good for just himself, not even for a single night. And, yes, I know that sounds like a guilt trip. He--” Oh, why the fuck not? “He still checks in on Margaret Carter, but her memory’s in bad shape, and she pretty much forgets between his visits that Cap was thawed out a few years back.”

She took another drink just to give Barnes another long moment to let all that sink in. She concluded, “So, no. He doesn’t have anyone special.” And neither did she. 

Rather than dwell on the tragedies, or open herself to more of his questions, Natasha reached for her purse and extracted the deck of cards. The caffeine was hitting her system, finally. “Wanna play something until breakfast?”

Bucky glanced down for a moment. He must have understood she was offering them both an out from the uncomfortableness of talking about Steve’s romantic life. “Rummy?” he finally asked.

“Sure. Any house rules?” She grabbed the complimentary pen and pad of paper from the Amtrak literature.

“Ace high and low,” he suggested, shuffling the cards with ease.

“And no mooching off of a meld until you’ve laid your own,” she countered, tasting the irony of that phrase given their previous train of conversation.

“Fair enough,” Barnes agreed. “Cut and I’ll deal.”

* * *

As they kept score their train slowed a couple of times at pre-dawn stops in small towns of North Dakota. 

Their game of Rummy went into the hundreds of points, but they were always neck and neck with each other. Staring at the cards, making his play, Bucky relaxed in the small-talk centered around the no-stakes game before him. 

Just around five-thirty in the morning, she pulled back the curtain that shaded their door and the blinds to their window that blocked them from the sparse, pre-dawn scenery of wheat-fields and badlands.

“I see why you chose this,” he broke the silence, motioning out to the barely inhabited plains with his chin. “A person could disappear out here, if they wanted.”

“You could have,” she observed, laying down another run between them, not looking directly at him.

“HYDRA needs to be destroyed first.”

“And after that?”

He picked up a jack from the top of the discard pile. “I don’t know,” he replied softly, a hint of melancholy welling from his throat.

“You have choices, Barnes. I’m sorry to lecture you, but you do.”

He sighed and rubbed his lips. A tell he wouldn’t have given if it was a poker game, she certained. He then asked, “Were you ever given a pardon?”

“From President Ellis’ predecessor? No. Nor from him.” How was she to give him hope? “S.H.I.E.L.D. had a lot of clout in the international community, thanks to Agent Carter’s and Howard Stark’s and the Phillips family’s life work. So a lot of what I had done was swept under the rug as long as I kept low enough profile.” She simply held off on playing her hand, gathering them into a small neat stack in her palm. She tapped the bundle on the table in front of her. “Then an alien invasion happened right in Manhattan, and saving the world basically made the Avengers gods in the public’s eyes. So by the time some senators got around to bringing up my record, I reminded them of that. And Captain America. No one’s political career goes far, criticizing his choice in companions.”

“It’s not regular people that I’m worried about,” he offered.

It was Stark. And the truth.

“Then maybe consider explaining to him?” Which ‘him’, Natasha left up to his imagination.

“You’re doing it again. Handling me,” he noted, his jaw clenching between his words.

“Would you rather go back to being Zachary and Samantha? Have a nice breakfast in the dining car and getting along?”

Before he could answer, there was movement outside of their suite, and a professional knock on the glass of their door. The attendant was in view. Natasha left her cards and stood up to greet him. 

“Good morning!” she offered cheerily after she unbolted the door.

“Off to an early start?” they were asked politely.

“We...ah...got a little wild last night,” she began. “Spilled some...uh...whiskey on the sheets and blankets. Is there something we should do?”

The uniformed man could believe her story or not, of what was spilled and what actually caused said spilling or not. But he was a professional and used to smoothing things over. “It’s not a big worry, ma’am. They’ll go into the laundry at our next service stop.”

She sighed in relief, looking back conspiratorily to her companion, who was either truly embarrassed or making a really good act at it. He fished out a bill from his pants and rested it discreetly on the table.

“I’ll fix everything up for you while you enjoy breakfast,” the man continued. “Dining car’s open at six thirty. No reservation.”

“Oh, great!” She then snatched the money -- a Benjamin -- from under Sheridan’s fingertips and pressed it towards their steward. “For the inconvenience.” 

“Ma’am,” he replied thankfully, closing the door with one hand as he stuffed the cash into his coat pocket with the other.

Natasha pulled the door shade closed again, to give them a bit more privacy.

“Thanks,” Barnes muttered, taking up their cards and putting them all back in their case. “I didn’t quite know what to say.”

“It’s easier when you’re good looking, rich, and cheerful,” she returned, resting a hand on his left-shoulder as she came up behind him. “I don’t know about you, handsome, but I’m ready for an omelette.”

Without looking at her, he reached for her hand with his ungloved-right and grasped it. Then the miraculous happened. Like an old-fashioned gentleman, he brought her knuckles to his lips, kissing one softly and pausing with flesh on flesh for just one beat -- while her heart may have stopped -- before releasing her. “Sure, gorgeous,” he agreed. “Let me get my pack.”

Breathless, she went to the cabinet to grab their jamming device and tie on her headscarf. She stared at herself only briefly in the mirror to wonder whether she’d, like this, want to be Samantha forever instead. If it meant his affection.

On their missions, her once-lover loathed Natalia’s aliases.

Now the pretending, together this time, was taking on a life of its own.

It would stop, she promised herself, when they landed at her safe-house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this one took longer than I wanted, but I wrote more to make up for it. And, yeah, it hints at Nat and Steve having a one-night stand back when they were on the run. 
> 
> A musical inspiration for this half of the fic is Suzanne Vega's song ["Some Journey," ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnS-QmHASX4) which I encourage readers that like to deep-dive into my stuff to listen to and read the lyrics. It's quintessentially Natasha.


	20. Bucky

His kiss to the back of her hand was without hesitation; a natural, almost instinctive response to her comforting palm on his shoulder and the endearment of ‘handsome’ passing without hitch over her lips. He could have lingered longer over her skin, but he simply meant to telegraph that he’d take up her invitation.

It was becoming easier to slip into his alias and their covers as lovers. There was a seduction to it, rewriting one’s past and present to be something different, better. More alive. More _free_. Natasha was leading him down that path, again and again, drawing him into a double life. The cocksure Barnes of the last century reincarnated somehow in Zachary Sheridan.

No wonder Romanoff had her reputation as one of the best spies of her generation. She could even fool him into fooling himself for a few hours. If he wasn’t careful, her type of drug could foster a growing addiction, leaving him helpless when danger came, getting her killed or him in custody before his mission of ending HYDRA was over. He had tasted it when he left his two satchels behind completely unsecured, because she held Zach’s hand and dragged him to watch the sunset.

The dawning outside their train compartment and the promise of a hearty breakfast as she affixed her disguise was another version of the siren’s call.

By his guess, they had only a half-day left to play at their covers, and some gut-feeling within him goaded him to make the best of it. The whole charade was as fragile as a spider’s web against a midwestern tornado or a mountain snowstorm. Just for a little while, he’d trace the threads towards the center of her, allow himself to be cocooned and entwined in the fantasy. Reborn into...

“Ready?” Samantha-Natasha asked.

He snapped out of his revery and met her eyes.

Her scarf draped around her pinned-up hair like an old-fashioned movie star. She half-smiled at Buck. No, not him. Never him, the assassin sent by Pierce to eliminate her. It was Zach. She smiled at Zach.

He grabbed his backpack from its stowage underneath his stripped-down bed and seated his plain ballcap on his head. “Yeah, let’s go.”

* * *

In the dining car, Buck bribed his way into another private table for him and his companion. 

She was fully Samantha now, stealing bites of his omelette with the works off his plate, and chatting about what he thought of _The Martian_ so far.

He responded positively but then noted: “I don’t get it about the disco references, though.”

Sam tilted her head, gave him a narrow-eyed look. “It’s not like you were spending the seventies in nightclubs.”

Zach would have only been a twinkle in his parents’ eyes at that point. She was probably, instead, referring to the _Soldat’s_ time in cryo-suspension and his single-focused missions between. He just poked at his breakfast potatoes gloomily, before asking softly. “Were they like dance halls?”

Sam got this little sidelong smile. “Way more drugs. Tons of lights and flash. One can barely think over how loud it is.” She took a sip of her mimosa. “Do you know how the French got the name _discothèque?_ The Resistance would host these parties in basements, dancing to the jazz and swing the occupiers forbade as too American, played on _verboten _records. To the French, _’disques’.___ ”

_Bucky twisted under the arm of a young war-widow before she twirled herself and twined hand to hand again. There was laughter in the smoky air above the jivvy beat and horns, tinny and hissy and thin from the player, but the only source to be had. A polyglot of languages and accents, elated and hopeful, wove and bobbed with the music. Instant morale._

_His navy blue peacoat was propped on his rifle with his ammo belt and pack set beside. He had a good chance of shedding much more before the night was over and yet still be quite warm, cozied up in a small, secret room reserved for clandestine goods and dissidents. The madame smuggler he swung knew all about discretion, about snatching joy before sorrow came knocking._

_Dum Dum, unable to get a cigar until resupply, contented himself with a cigarette, puffing away. Jacques manned the crank turntable._

_And Steve? Steve simply sat in the corner, fondling his compass in his muscular palm, content to save his pleasure-taking for after the war._

Samantha’s touch, almost a caress on the hand cradling his coffee mug, returned his attention with a start, shuttered the memory once more into a vague fog.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, frowning slightly, realizing by the temperature of his drink that he had probably zoned out for several minutes.

“You should try it sometime,” Samantha offered in a tone that seemed to suggest he had nothing to apologize for. She gave that hand a small pat and finished off her breakfast.

“Disco music?” he finally asked, recalling and skeptical. He wiped his mouth with his napkin.

“ _Non, monsieur._ ” She quirked a brief smile and it was her turn to get a far-away look while gazing out their table window. Just for a moment, the morning sunlight shown through the depths of green in her irises. “ _Dansant_.”

The hairs on the back of his neck rose and tingled. Had he muttered something? Did Rogers once confide? 

If he was to remain as Zach, he had to straddle himself over the usual abyss, return kind for kind with his ‘girlfriend.’ 

“What about you? With the dancing?” he asked, then clarified before she could counter with ‘what do you mean’ bullshit. “What have you done?”

“Ballet,” Sam replied. “Years and years of it. Every day, early in the morning, before school started. Because my mother insisted. I hated it, but she decided that girls needed structure and discipline in order to succeed in life.” The disdain sounded so fucking real.

Zach-Buck found himself scoffing, setting down his napkin on his plate. “Your Mom sounds like an outright bitch.” Jesus, that sentiment came so, so easy to him, too. The roles must be growing.

“She was.” So part of Samantha Lamar’s story was that her mother had died, somehow.

“Cancer?” he asked, improvising.

“Heart attack,” she dropped, then cleared her throat as their waiter approached to take up their plates and asked if there was anything else they needed.

A few minutes later, the couple gathered their things. Samantha slipped on her sunglasses while Zach left a very nice tip.

* * *

They finished their books in companionable silence in their neatened suite, each taking a side of the couch, their ankles almost entwined with one another.

Over the spine and cover of his book, Zach would glance now and then at Samantha, wondering more about her past, however constructed it was. Then Buck looked again at Natasha and had the same curiosity.

She was Russian by birth and trained in covert ops. Had she known of the Winter Soldier? Crossed paths with him?

He worried at his own lips, contemplating. Russia, and the Soviet Union before that, was a country of millions with governmental organizations obsessed with compartmentalization in the spin of their own paranoia. And then there was his own fate, put in stasis for months or years at a time.

So he told himself not to be ridiculous. If Natasha had ever laid eyes on the Winter Soldier before D.C, it would be like anyone asking Bucky -- just because he once lived in New York City in the 1930s -- if he had ever rubbed elbows with Duke Ellington. 

They took lunch in the sightseeing cafe and lounge car with its open views. Over the train’s intercom, the conductor announced that they were passing from central to mountain timezones. Zach took a moment to sync his watch, careful to hide the metallic shine of his forearm beyond his glove.

Their train’s first stop in Montana was a prairie town, with a sign near the tracks that read ‘Welcome to Wolf Point,’ with a painted howling wolf cut-out next to it. The Amtrak literature said the town was named for its hunting and trapping of the animals back even before Buck was born.

“There really isn’t anything left of them, is there?”

Samantha must not have chewed her bite of sandwich all the way, because she coughed significantly for a few moments, before swigging her bottled water and recovering.

“You mean the wolves?” she rasped, before clearing her throat.

“Yeah.” Something of it felt melancholy to him.

“They’ve been reintroduced to Yellowstone. They’ve found their own way back to Glacier, too, from up in Canada.” She shrugged. “But a lot of the ranchers argue that they’re putting their livelihood at risk. It’s a bit of a thorny debate among the locals.”

“Oh,” he responded, realizing that the topic, much like politics and religion, would be on the list of things to avoid chit-chatting with strangers about. Not that either Zach or Buck was given to chit-chatting much.

She reached for her purse. “I brought the cards. Care for a rematch?”

* * *

It was an odd thing in packing up and leaving the tight accommodations of their bedroom-on-rails. Two days and two restless nights were spent in these compartments, punctuated only by an afternoon in Chicago.

Romanoff had only said that her Jeep was waiting for them in Browning.

And after that? An apartment in some high-prairie town just populated enough not to be noticed too much? She had to have specialized tech somewhere to de-encrypt the HYDRA files.

As they ordered the last of their meager belongings, she mentioned over her shoulder: “I’ll need eight-hundred off the top for the folks that store our ride.” 

“Alright,” Buck acknowledged, taking out the stuff-stack dedicated to the expenses of the vacation-operation. He handed her the money, then decided that he’d also conceal a pistol, a knife, and a baton on his person, not knowing exactly what to expect in the next leg of their journey.

If she isolated him and contacted the Avengers…

“We made a deal, Barnes,” Natasha said, her hands on her hips. God, something must be telegraphing his nervousness. “This isn’t the time to get cold feet.”

He just clenched his jaw and told himself to ‘buck up’. “You can’t expect me to get off this train and be unarmed,” he countered.

Natasha’s face and frame suddenly went still, leaden, and she blinked. There was something in her eyes that looked like he had just told her some deeply tragic news. What had he--?

Oh. Oh, fuck. Steve must’ve…about the freight car. The Fall.

The world was closing in again. The pressure-panic building. Everything giving way...

In the dreaded fear-fog, she reached for him. “Take my hand, Barnes,” Natasha entreated, and Buck felt her palm cradle his right. “Just take my hand.” She squeezed. “C’mere. There. Now, hold on as tight as you need.” 

The next thing he realized was that he was trembling, his forehead on her supple shoulder, one arm enveloping him while the other cradled their entwined hands between their laps. There was a heat at the back of his neck and the caress of fingers familiar into his dampened hair. His left appendage hooked around her waist, vice-like. Where he was cold and tense and weak and adrift, she countered. Warm and bending yet strong. Grounded.

She coaxed into his ear. “Feel your breath. In....and...out.” He was so close in this embrace, he could feel her own lungs fill and empty. Calm and measured. “Follow my lead.”

He began to match her breaths. The details of time and space, of here and now, began to fill in again. They were embraced on the suite’s couch.

“God,” he cursed to the narrowness between them. “I’m…” A wreck. A monster. A broken thing.

“It was _me_ that accidentally triggered that. My fuckup,” she confessed, and he felt her shake her head a little. “Your words just...nevermind. Nevermind.”

It was a miracle it hadn’t happened before. It was another that she was there to catch him.

Buck then became acutely aware of every point of contact with Natasha. The feel of the fabric of her sundress; the way her fingers were laced into his hair. The curve of her torso. The cinnamon scent of her skin.

He took in one last deep breath, before forcing himself to sit up and let the embrace dissolve. It was too hard to meet her eyes. Embarrassment and frustration and something else made him feel tiny in her presence.

“Did we miss our stop?” he asked softly.

Then the train began to slow. She stood up and took her purse, then slid on her sunglasses. “This is it,” she replied, a positivity to her tone. “Shall we?”

He took in one last sigh, nodded, and put on his ballcap.

Natasha won’t be around forever, he thought as he followed her. She certainly couldn’t save him from himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, off the train and onto the cozy cabins.


	21. Natasha

They didn’t leave their compartment, not immediately, even as the train stopped and another announcement for Browning, Montana was made over the intercoms. She gave him the compact to keep in his back pocket (where she could most likely detect him fiddling with it in case he should turn.)

Barnes was shaken but steady enough to take her continued lead. Natasha wished she could have spared a little more time in assuring that he wasn’t going to bolt or completely melt-down, but wishes were not something she counted on much since she left the Motherland.

“We need to run some countersurveillance,” she stated, matter-of-factly. “First off, make note of everyone that steps off with us. Their cars. Their shoes. Shouldn’t be many. There really isn’t a station, just a platform. I’ll make a call to my contact when we’re off. Just...keep an eye out.”

Barnes shouldered his backpack and picked up his dufflebag, with only a nod to her that he understood. She recalled how non-verbal the Winter Soldier had been, when his orders superseded the expression of the passionate and defiant man underneath. Natasha had voiced that he wasn’t the _Soldat_ anymore, that he could start over, even though deep down in her gut, she knew that he’d carry the weighty shadows of his deeds for HYDRA until his last breath.

“And everyone around here knows me as Sasha, so call me that.”

“Are we still…?” he began to ask.

“‘Sweethearts?’” she quoted, unable to look at him that moment however confident her voice. “Yes.”

Natasha couldn’t spare more brooding, so she simply put on her sunglasses and opened their bedroom door when she sensed no one immediately outside to mark their departure.

Her companion followed her down the stairs and then out the open portal of the sleeper car. Their attendendant was standing just outside to tend tending to the incoming and outgoing passengers. 

“We look forward to you riding again with us,” the porter pitched to them with a smile, likely remembering the tip.

“Thanks,” Samantha returned. “It was really lovely.” After a flash of smile from her, they were all business.

Both casually alert, they walked away from the train platform, towards a long sloping ramp. There were a few private corrugated-metal storage facilities nearby, otherwise, their landing was unhospitably a few miles from town, the access road cutting through fields. One had two choices: arrange a private ride or wait half an hour or more for a cab that serviced hundreds of square miles. This was the edge of the wilderness, between the flatlines and alpine elevations of the Rocky Mountains.

The summer evening sky was clear, but there was still moisture on the prairie breeze.

Browning was not a busy stop, and Natasha only saw one other stepping away from train cars behind. The person was at least six-and-some feet tall with indigenous American features. Male. Thin in the way ropey-muscular men could be. He carried a maroon backpack meant for multi-day use in the wild, with some sort of wooden ceremonial staff lashed to the back. Dark hair in traditional braids at his shoulders. He could be in his thirties or much older.

“Get about ten strides away from me and keep an eye on things,” she directed when she caught Barnes staring at the juts of majestic, rocky peaks to the west, tantalizing near. “And I mean _not_ the mountains.” 

“I got it,” he muttered, reminded of her compact in his back pocket. Barnes walked downwind, dropped his bags, and just seemed to stare at the silver train and how its couplings linked again at the tug of the engine as it slowly pulled away.

Natasha made her call to Mary Red-Calf’s house. “I’ve landed. Yeah. And I have a last-minute guest with me,” she finally confessed, glancing at Barnes’ from the side of her eye.

The native man with the backpack walked towards the exit of the station platform and raised his hand in a small greeting to the only other debarkers: them. As she talked on her phone, Natasha observed how both men’s body language went in a few seconds from guarded to more relaxed as they made brief dialog. The stranger offered his hand to Barnes and he took it, shaking. “Um...make that three of us for the ride into town.”

 _”Well, two or three, we have plenty for supper,”_ Mary invited, obliquely. _“Jackie’s on his way.”_ The connection ended, and Natasha sighed, trying to figure out what to make of the new predicament as she approached the two.

Whatever they said out of her earshot, Barnes-Sheridan gave a tilt of his head to the stranger, once more in the skin of his alias. “Thought we could give Will a lift,” he told her.

Shit. Was this some sort of hand-off or set-up? 

Natasha sized the guy up, saw the worn discount-store boots and the ground-in trail dirt clinging to the weave of his pack. The golden wood staff he also toted seemed well-loved, too. If it was a cover, it was _good_. HYDRA liked things pristine and orderly, a remnant of their authoritarian past. Good luck trying that recruitment tactic within the remnants of the First Nations. Still, she’d have to be cautious.

“Always happy to help out,” she fibbed. Then held out her own hand. “Sasha Manorly.”

“Will Talltrees,” he returned with a slight accent. The man had calluses on his hand, and Natasha suspected that his staff wasn’t completely for ceremony. Wonderful.

“The Red-Calfs have invited us for supper and you are welcome to join in.” Was he a local returning home or someone else? “Do you know them?”

“Can’t say I do,” replied the lanky man. “But who could turn down a home-cooked meal?”

“A nice way to start a vacation,” she replied, reshouldering her purse. This was the dance of chit-chat and intelligence gathering she was used to.

“Headed for the park?” Will asked, glancing between Barnes and her.

“Tomorrow, I think,” she replied, glad that her companion was letting her do the talking now. “Get a good night’s sleep before we head out to Glacier.”

Talltrees pursed his lips, slightly. Shit. He was onto something. She wasn’t dressed right for a backcountry adventure.

“I make him carry all the gear,” she covered. “Hiking boots are, you know, _so_ uncomfortable. I don’t see how you guys wear them all the time.” Zach-Bucky just smiled, softly at her as if towing around her stuff was a labor of love, going along.

And because it was only polite to trade itineraries: “You?”

“Research at the museum archives,” Will returned. He seemed an unlikely scholar, but one never knew.

“That’s _right_. The Plains Indian museum.” She looked back to her ‘boyfriend’. “Maybe we can catch it on the way back?” she inquired. “Or, if you know, the weather turns wrong up in the peaks.”

“Sounds good to me,” Zach returned.

Then something caught Will’s attention in the distance, and Natasha half-turned to see a car -- her aging Jeep -- approach down the pavemented road to the station.

“Our ride, gentlemen.”

She then pretended to be looking for something in her cavernous purse -- ahah! a hairband -- so that she could be the last down the ramp to the sidewalk, keeping both men in view in front of her. As she tied up her hair in a low ponytail, she saw Barnes clench his jaw, knowing exactly what she was doing and why, but unwilling to break character to mention anything about it.

Jackie Red-Calf, middle-aged and with an almost military-short haircut, left the Jeep idling while they made introductions. He and Will exchanged something in their native tongues, a brief greeting and welcome, she guessed. Natasha opened up the back door, where a narrow, metal trunk box was wedged between the back bench-seat and the squat rear door of the vehicle.

She extracted a beat-up straw cowboy hat from the box and put it on with a flirtatious wink to Sheridan.

“Zach, best put your bags back here, and Will can take the front.” she volunteered, reapproaching and addressing Jackie. “If you wouldn’t mind chauffeuring us back?”

“Sure,” Jackie returned, likely figuring that Sasha wouldn’t mind the excuse to sit close to the man she had brought with her.

Within another minute, they had climbed and settled into the utilitarian vehicle with its standard transmission. The Wrangler wasn’t very roomy in the back, and Natasha was knee-to-knee with Barnes, who kept an eye on the two men in the driver’s and passenger’s seat. Will kept his pack and his staff between his legs.

She’d tell Barnes later about how she had found Jackie working the small Blackfeet tribal casino in Browning years earlier, learned about his perpetually-sick daughter, and pitched the idea of maintaining her wheels while she was out of state. Natasha suspected the family knew that Sasha Manorly was more than a white trust-fund girl on a skiing or a hiking holiday, but they were discrete. The Blackfeet reservation gave the impression that outsiders - like herself and her companion - were simply guests. Natasha was careful never to overstay. 

From the conversation up front between Will and Jackie, she learned that Talltrees was of the Cheyenne nation. They chatted about upcoming inter-tribal powwows in English. She just watched outside the side window for anything incongruous about their route or the sparse traffic on gridded streets, mostly a too-clean or too-modern car. There was a yesteryear feel to the residential parts of Browning: poverty mixed with midwestern utilitarianism. Her Jeep fit right in.

In only a few minutes, Jackie pulled the vehicle aside their mobile home and turned off the ignition. Nothing seemed suspect, so far.

After stepping out of shotgun and taking his pack, Will pulled forward the seat for her, allowing her to slip out with more ease. She tossed her hat and sunglasses on the vacated seat to await the next part of her journey.

Barnes was busy getting his backpack from the trunk, though she was relieved he left the rest locked up in the vehicle.

When they entered through the mobile home's door, Mary-the-matriarch was at the electric stove, stirring something savory-smelling in one pot, while monitoring another. She was a compact woman, and to Natasha, the term ‘ageless as the hills’ came to mind, with steel-gray hairs shooting through her sable sheen.

Jackie said something to his mother, and she turned with her wooden spoon in hand to take in Will, then Zach, then Sasha. She was half-blind with cateract in one eye, but still sharp of heart.

“Travelers have many wolves in their bellies,” Mary observed. “Let me feed the good ones.”

That caused Will to smile widely as if enjoying a private joke, shrug his sack off, and extend his hands with another greeting to the woman, towering over her.

While the two strangers exchanged pleasantries, Jackie offered her the keys to her vehicle. She then swapped them in her purse for the roll of cash, all while Talltree’s back was turned to them. No one needed to know their business, even one who had more ancestral blood in common than Natasha did with this family. He walked down the only hall in the mobile home, likely to secure the cash somewhere else.

Natasha was next, squeezing Mary’s wrinkled fingers. “And this is Zach Sheridan,” she introduced, turning to Barnes, who was likely assessing threats and making exit plans, given his almost-suppressed nervousness. “We met a few months ago.”

Zach-Buck took off his hat, as if suddenly re-realizing manners, however old-fashioned. His ragged long hair fell in his eyes before he raked it back. “Thank you for the meal, Ma’am. Missus Red-Calf.” There was something in his accent, not Brooklynite, not quite Southern. Natasha considered she didn’t know everything about Barnes’ past, despite the files and Steve’s confessions.

“Well, I hope you all like venison stew and mac-and-cheese,” Mary said, then returned to her stirring.

* * *

The five of them ate, not at a table, but sitting on a couch or cross-legged on the floor next to the old CRT television, turned off. Barnes took a corner seat, his back to the wall, his pack within arm’s reach.

“Big Fourth of July festival this weekend in the valley over,” said Mary. Natasha knew what she meant by ‘the valley over’: Kalispell and the resort towns nestled in between Rocky Mountain ridges. A mixture of the social-conservative working class, sportsmen, and the well-off seasonal patrons.

Natasha nodded, swallowing another spoonful of the stew. “That may be fun.”

Jackie then inquired, “Know how long you’re staying?”

“Four or five days, maybe. Depends on the weather. I’ll give you a call ahead when we’ll drop the jeep off.” Or how hard it’d be to work her technological wizardry on HYDRAs secrets. “The usual drill.”

As they finished their shared meal, Will negotiated to camp in the Red-Calf’s meager yard while he had his business at the Museum of the Plains Indian. In the course of conversation, Talltrees mentioned his goal was to look into ancient Cheyenne artifacts of powerful medicine. At one point in her life, Natasha may have scoffed at magic and myths; as an Avenger, fighting with a hammer-wielding Asgardian, she couldn’t be so dismissive anymore.

Barnes didn’t talk much, other than to ask for a second helping.

“I will pray tonight for the healing of your granddaughter,” Talltrees offered as they finished up. “And a safe journey for Sasha and Zach.”

Jackie and Mary gave their thanks in their native tongue.

“May I do the dishes?” Natasha offered politely. 

“No need,” Mary returned. “I imagine you want to get on the road before dark.”

In truth, they had an errand in Browning consisting of buying groceries.

After goodbyes, Barnes took the passenger seat as Natasha tossed on her cowboy hat again and adjusted the jeep’s mirrors. Will Talltrees began setting up a modern pop-up tent that had symbols and animals painted on the walls.

Out the rolled-down window, Sasha gave a little farewell wave to their fellow traveler, who seemed to be on a quest of his own. Talltrees held his hand up, almost in a benediction as she put the jeep in gear and drove slowly away and onto the streets of Browning.

“So?” Barnes asked. “What now?”

“Supplies,” she answered, turning onto another street and watching for oddities in pedestrian and driver behavior in an intuitive way that long-time operatives did. Clint was better at it. That’s how he had found her safe-house long ago and instead of ambushing her there, gave her a way out.

In the grocery store, Barnes frowned, looking over the refrigerated shelves with what seemed a bit of bewilderment.

“Different from your grandma’s store, huh?” Natasha asked, hinting of the 1940s and earlier.

“Who needs five different types of lettuce? Triple washed?” he complained, to which she caught herself smiling in response. God, he and Steve were peas in a pod.

“Here,” she dug around in her purse she set on their shopping cart. “I have a list. I’ll read it to you, and we’ll just go from there.” She started with the first. “‘Fruit - Bananas, etcetera’.”

They found the bananas easily.

“The etcetera?” he inquired.

“Whatever’s looking good,” she answered, turning down the aisle with stacked oranges, apples, and other fruit.

As he pondered over the selection, Natasha split her attention between the other shoppers and him. The irony of two assassins going grocery shopping was not lost on her. 

“Here, it’s best to feel them.” She demonstrated by grabbing a plum from next to the cart and giving it a squeeze. “Hmm. A little hard, but we put them in a paper bag, and they’ll ripen in a few days. Try it.” She dropped the plum into his left, and he nodded, testing. “Get six. Oh, and melons. Nothing like the taste of watermelon in the summer.”

* * *

The back bench seat filled with groceries and dusk coming on, Natasha made her last zig-zag on neighborhood streets, looking for trail cars out of habit. Nothing. Perhaps the paranoia was all for nothing.

As she aimed the jeep west on a two-lane highway, towards the jutting, snow-crowned mountains and passing the outskirts of town, something large and swift moved parallel to them in the ditch, caught in the corner of her eye.

“What the hell?” she muttered, turning her head, and being unable to get a lock. She looked then to her side mirror and saw the shape of something canine or lupine, fur tinged amber and rust with the setting sun, lope across the pavement of the two-lane road a number of yards behind them. As it moved, it’s head was lifted to watch the vehicle.

“What is it?” Barnes asked, twisting in his seat to look over his shoulder and out the back.

Natasha took her foot off the gas and looked in the rearview. Nothing. Vanished.

“I...I think it was a coyote.” An impossibly-large, ruddy coyote. “Or a farmer’s dog.”

Wolf? Couldn’t be. Maybe two centuries ago, maybe even one. But now?

“Well,” Barnes replied. “Coyotes are everywhere. There’s nothing really that competes with them anymore. Thanks to us.” The apex predator that is humankind, the super-apex predator that was him and her.

“Let’s just get going,” was all she could think to say, putting her foot on the accelerator again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ironically, this chapter came out on Columbus Day. *sigh*
> 
> Red Wolf is a Native American character created by Stan Lee. I couldn't resist intersecting the hero with Natasha and Bucky, given they were going through William Talltrees' birthplace.
> 
>  
> 
> [The Cherokee 'proverb' of the Two Wolves can be read here.](http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TwoWolves-Cherokee.html)


	22. Bucky

With Buck in the front passenger seat, Natasha drove her jeep due west from Browning towards the the Rocky Mountains. They traveled for just over a half hour, chasing the last light of the sun, as he measured by the most recent glance at his watch.

Within a few seconds of his last time-check, she braked abruptly, turning off the paved road at a gravelled four-way intersection. Dust kicked up around the vehicle as she sped only another hundred yards before coming to a complete halt. Natasha killed the lights and the engine all at once, plunging them into near-darkness.

Buck could sense her tension, and a flash came to him that This Was It. In another moment, a quinjet would uncloak itself and barrel in, and he’d be taken into custody by the Avengers. She and he were now far away from civilians; little chance for collateral damage. He should have known better than to think that his compromise would end in anything but _This_. She’d have it all: the money, the intel, and Steve’s gratitude. Pulling his gun on her would only lead to a prolonged stand-off, and he was only one man. No flying armor suit. No mystical hammer. He’d lose, even with a fight.

With his heightened vision, he saw Natasha’s profile in the near-dark, how she kept her hands on the wheel, waiting.

“This is it?” he asked tiredly. “This is where it’s supposed to start getting all better for me?”

“You’re not afraid?” she asked, not even looking at him.

“If I could have...” He swallowed, shook his head even as his heartbeat raced. “It’s not about fear, Romanoff," he half-lied. "Me running away? It’s just....” His mind was racing, flashes of another car on another night road slamming into a tree just ahead of him, crumpling the hood. An ‘accident’ that was not an accident at all. “Damage control.”

“You think that Steve and the Avengers are about to swoop in?” What was she getting at?

“It makes the most sense,” he returned, watching and listening and still detecting nothing. “You said you owed him something, when all I have ever done to you is do my level best to kill you.”

“Well,” she replied in that ironic tone of hers. “You’re level best didn’t ever seem to get the job done.”

What was she implying? God, his head and heart and stomach were spinning now.

“Just get it over with. Make your signal to them. Do it.” 

“That was never the plan,” she stated, taking her arms off the steering wheel and crossing them. "Remember. We made a pact."

“Then why the _fuck_ did you stop?!” he demanded, at the edge of his patience with her verbal dance. He was about to wrench the door open and just shout to the skies that he surrendered rather than to have to endure her head-games any longer.

“I need you respect _my_ need for damage control,” she replied evenly. “The place where I’m taking you no one but Clint knows how to find. I’d like to keep it out of HYDRA’s scope because we still don’t know their tech. You’re hot, and jamming or no, they must be looking for you. They did a lot to you, Bucky Barnes. In all that time they may even have planted ways you don’t know about to telegraph yourself, given the right trigger. You’ve considered that, right?”

He sighed glumly. So that was what this pit-stop was. Her not trusting him. Still betting he was some sort of HYDRA mole.

“What do you want me to do?” he finally asked, surrendering.

“In the glove compartment there is a pair of sunglasses,” she directed. “Put them on and keep them on.”

Wrap-around block-out glasses, he found out. Completely opaque from the inside. He’d have a general sense of the area they were in, but no concrete information about roads or orientation leading them to her safe-house.

“Thought you’d prefer this to being stuffed in a trunk,” she noted, starting the jeep up again. 

“There isn’t a trunk,” he pointed out, blinded.

“Exactly,” she said, gunning the vehicle and doing three or four tight circles in the empty intersection to disorient him before straightening and continuing on their journey. Within another hour, she had made numerous turns, and Bucky figured she was taking a long, circuitous way to their destination, so he couldn’t simply keep track of left and right and distance, even without his eyes to aid him.

His ears popped several times as they gained elevation. Finally, the sound underneath their wheels changed from a maintained gravel road to something more rugged. Another fifteen minutes or so of bounces and back-road dips and then she brought the jeep to another stop.

“Wait here,” she ordered, leaving her door open and the vehicle idling. Bucky caught what sounded like a chain rattling, and the squeak of some sort of gate being opened. The cool, pine-scented mountain air wafted into the jeep’s space.

Natasha climbed back in and slowly drove them up another incline for another couple of minutes, until finally leveling. Then another crunch of gravel came under their tires before the jeep came to a standstill. A driveway of some sort, he guessed.

“This is it,” Natasha remarked. “And I’m not leading you by the hand, so might as well take the glasses off.” She turned off the engine and opened the driver’s side door.

Bucky’s eyes were already adjusted to the dark, so when he removed the black-out glasses, he caught they were parked in front of a two car garage just separate of what appeared to be a rustic-looking building of log timber and wood shingles, two storeys and with a dormered roof. No light -- not even a porch-light -- welcomed them.

Tall pines had been cut back about twenty yards in every direction from the cabin, or did the size of it qualify the building as a lodge? The only entry and exit to the property for a vehicle was behind them, along a dirt double-track that looked seldom used.

She grabbed a flashlight from where it had been stashed under the driver’s seat. “Stay in the car. I’ll open up from the inside when it’s clear.” She took her purse and closed the jeep’s door behind her. She left the keys in the ignition.

Buck watched as she turned the flashlight on and cased the door and two porch-side windows, likely looking for signs of breaking and entering, before turning the handheld illumination off again. Then she went around the darkened building and out of sight.

Out of instinct, he shifted to the driver’s side. If there was an ambush by ordinary human goons, he (with her too?) had a decent chance to make a get-away. He should have insisted on going along with Natasha, but he realized his observations on her security measures was likely unwelcome. 

He waited in tense silence, his hands clenching the steering wheel until -- almost like the magic of a fairytale cottage -- the house lit up all at once from the inside, golden radiance in almost every window and the frosted sconce on the porch now aglow. Natasha then stepped out of the front door. She saw him in the jeep, ready to bolt, but nothing changed her demeanor. The safe-house broadcast, well, _safety._

Natasha opened the car’s door. He realized he hadn’t yet let go of the wheel. She was all business now, relaxed and in-charge. “I’ll give you the tour once we get the groceries put away and get your stuff in.”

* * *

The air was just starting to warm in the home by the time they had finished putting away the food.

Bucky saw nothing of the promised high-tech equipment, not even a television. The only things that assured him that the cabin was not lifted from his childhood was the modern kitchen appliances and some sort of master control panel on an inner wall. The great room off the kitchen with its large windows had both a fireplace _and_ a cast iron wood stove. All the wooden-framed furniture was rustic in style, glowing with its own burnish. 

“The contractors thought I was some sort of survivalist, getting it with the built-in generator and the solar and the backup heating,” she explained as he marveled at the space. “There’s even a hand-pump to the well in the garage. Everything’s completely off the grid. No phone lines, no internet. Hard to get even a decent radio station up here.”

“That’s why you took us here to crack the drives? No chance at spreading...what do they call it? A virus? Worm? Going into other networked computers?” He glanced at the bags he left near the door, HYDRA’s secrets still within.

A short nod was her own answer before she motioned up a stairway, banistered charmingly with a single long branch of knotted, unhewn wood. “The loft’s all yours. Bathroom. Two bedrooms, bunk-beds and a queen.” 

The place was large enough for a growing family, large enough to be not just a safe-house, but a _home_. In the proceeding hours of feeling on-edge, the space called for him to set down his burdens and rest. With the graceful wood accents, the airy great room, it was an earthly version of The Last Homely House that his tired mind conjured, wherever he had picked that up from.

A yawn took him over just contemplating a real bed.

“We’ll start in the morning. When we’re both fresh,” Natasha stated, turning around to face him. “And you can give me that thing burning a hole in your pants.”

He had nearly forgotten the jamming device, and he placed it in her outstretched palm. With a twist and a press to a hidden button, she seemed satisfied it was deactivated.

She then looked up to his face and her full lips parted slightly, words yet unformed. Buck thoughts went to Samantha, recalling their shared charade. Thought of the way she…

“I’ll take care of the groceries and the downstairs lights,” Natasha spoke, stepping backward just as he was trying to come up with what the fuck to do with his half-formed notion.

“Right.” He turned away to collect his things and make sense of his upstairs accommodations. “Good night,” he offered politely.

* * *

For the first time since the Potomac, Bucky dared to put his clothes into the dresser drawers of the loft’s larger bedroom rather than leaving them in their bag, ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice from whatever seedy room he had rented that night. There were clean flannel shirts and worn jeans folded already in one of the drawers. Barton’s he realized.

After dealing with the ambient noise of a train for two nights, the utter silence and darkness of the cabin deep within the forest had him restless.

His room had its own little balcony. Barefooted and in his sleeping clothes, he parted the long curtains, unlatched the lock on the narrow door, and stepped onto it. The mountain air, even in summer, was clean and chilly. He could see nothing past the sentinel of trees that ringed the property, but above -- Dear God! -- the stars were brilliant, the moonless sky so inky that the Milky Way was a glowing path spread across the heavens.

He exhaled at the majesty of it. The smallness of himself against the vastness of creation.

What if he could, after HYDRA was demolished, live like this? Go up into the mountains, figure out how to build a cabin of his very own? No harm coming to anyone, anymore. No more ghosts bleeding out on the floor of a hotel room or falling victim to a launched explosive as his prey drove down a city street...

Buck didn’t expect the tears to come, hot against his mountain-cooled cheeks, but they did. And he let them stream, not feeling so much as sob to accompany them.

Someday, maybe. Someday he’d have his peace. He had a billion stars to wish upon.

* * *

_  
Through the haze of sleep, Buck heard the soft ‘click’ of a door opening into his bedroom. He rose to one elbow and first looked to the door leading from the stairs. Closed._

_He then glanced to the balcony to the right._

_The moon had risen, casting a glow on the calico curtains. The blueish light framed a silhouette just inside the room._

_“Natasha?” he called, confused as to why she wouldn’t just knock._

_She took a step towards him. Bucky realized she didn’t seem to be wearing anything for clothes, only a white cotton bedsheet held tight to her breasts by one hand. It trailed behind her like a gown._

_Christ, he didn’t want to stare. “What’s wrong?”_

_“I miss what we were before,” she answered softly, turning her gaze down and away, as if uneasy with the admission. “How we touched.”_

Before. _Before? She must mean their covers on the train. Samantha and Zachary._

_He sat all the way up, his heart beating at the memory of holding hands, of her strokes through his hair, of how his arm draped around her. Even when he came out of the grip of The Fall to find himself clinging to her._

_“I…” How was he to even_ begin _to respond? His mouth went dry. She’d find out soon enough how broken and unmanned HYDRA had left their Soldier. But she didn’t know yet, and whatever her intention? Fuck it, he thought. He’d never get the chance to be with a woman as incredible as her again. Certainly not after she discovered his secret._

_“I miss it, too,” he confessed, feeling the rush of relief at having not to battle anymore with half-formed desires._

_Natasha smiled softly, coming to the edge of the bed. She touched him oh-so-delicately on the cheekbone. “Tell me what you want.”_

_She was giving _him_ complete control. He was dizzy with the prospect of where to begin, even assured of where it would end._

_“Would you..um...lay down behind me and hold me for a bit?”_

_“Happily,” she responded. “Turn on your side.”_

_He grabbed his pillow and turned his back to her, settling his head down again, waiting with his pulse in his ears. The weight of her shifted down to the mattress, her feet slipping under the sheets and blanket he had pushed down to his waist. The smoothness of her calf entwined with his own, delicious skin on skin. Through his boxer-briefs and t-shirt, he felt her body mold around his. She snaked one arm under their shared pillow, the other she kept folded between them._

_“Everyone calls this spooning, now-a-days,” she said conversationally, after several minutes of only their breathing filling the silence. “Do you like it?”_

_Natasha was treating him so gently, with no hint of contempt._

_“Yeah,” he said, noticing how their shared warmth was dulling the sharp-edges of his self-loathing. “I liked it when you did that thing with your hands in my hair. What does everyone call that?”_

_“Hmm. You’d have to ask a writer for that one,” she answered into his ear. “Would you like me to do it again? I like it a lot, too.”_

_Why was this inch-by-inch negotiation so sexy and exactly what he needed?_

_“Please,” he returned, remembering the bliss of it._

_The gentle pull and release as her fingers again wove through his hair had him feel floaty. Desired. And within him, a yearning._

_“Would you…?” He licked his lips, turning his head slightly back at her. Finding the words was more difficult than he thought, but she had shown him how. “..kiss me on my neck?” It was more than they had done on the train, yet now they were completely alone. And he_ wanted _to know what her mouth felt like, before a real kiss between would make a promise he could never keep and send it all crashing down._

_“Sure,” she agreed, swiping his ragged locks aside._

_She nuzzled him first with her nose, priming him, before her wet lips dragged on the crook of his neck. The sweet shock of it made him moan and shudder. As she varied between suckling his ear and nibbling close to his collarbone, some sort of pressure built inside his chest and in the very base of his skull._

_“God, Nat,” he breathed, wanting more, fearing less. He used her name with the intimacy he had not dared before, feeling the_ rightness _about it in just this moment. This_ only _moment he could take before the reality of his impotence had her second-guessing her choice to join him._

_“You alright?” she paused, her hand on his shoulder as she leaned over him to look into his eyes. Nothing but concern on her otherwise flushed face. “We can stop at any time.”_

_He swallowed. Whatever less he was tonight, he’d not give Them the victory of his cowardice. “I want to show you something, something you should know.”_

_“Whatever you want,” she agreed, a small but puzzled smile floating across her otherwise open features. “Whatever you need.”_

_“Do that thing again, with your mouth...just for a little longer,” he took up her hand, nuzzled his own face into her open palm before he settled back against her. “And follow me.”_

_Sorrow and passion warred with him now as he guided her captured hand over his torso. Her breath was warm against his neck, her body firm as it pressed to his own. He didn’t look at her face, didn’t want to see the forthcoming disappointment that he could never couple with her._

_She raked her nails along his chest where he paused, tugging at the fabric of his shirt. He closed his eyes, thinking what it would have been like to cup her own breasts, tease at her nipples just right until she called_ his _given name -- James! My god, James! -- as her self-restraint melted._

_He traced how it would be to dip his fingers lower, over her stomach and mons, parting her with measured fever, finding that sweet spot responding to his touch as she slicked over him._

_A tightness, edgy and electric, in his own groin made him gasp and come back around to Natasha’s hand kneading caresses through the weave of his underwear. To his shock, his cock was aching and twitching and straining to be freed. Rising to seek that intimate friction and ultimate release._

_“See? How hard is that?” she purred playfully, discarding the careful phrases she used earlier. There was only one obvious conclusion now. Still, she asked. “More?”_

_Buck twisted toward her, looked up at her luminous face hanging over him, the beautiful curtain of her moon-bright hair. He tugged down his briefs with one quick arch off the bed, inhaling again as her deft fingers wrapped around his length and then pumped slowly up and down over his head._

__This couldn’t be real _was his only fleeting thought as he pushed himself upward with his left arm, seeking to share with her a triumphant, wonder-filled kiss. He closed his eyes, reaching for Natasha._

_She was gone._

* * *

Buck found himself alone in his bedroom, his own hand wrapped around his engorged, leaking member. He looked to the balcony entry washed in morning light, then back to the door, and finally over the bed looking for Natasha’s ivory sheet.

None of it had happened. Except something had. The heft and need of his own erection after -- what? -- decades of disuse and isolation frightened him.

“What am I doing?!” he blurted to himself, guilty thoughts of her mingling with the residual arousal coursing in his blood. A fucking wet dream, like he was a teenager back in Brooklyn looking at the under-the-counter Tijuana bibles that an older busboy once showed him. Prohibited. Illegal. Forbidden. 

He tugged up his underwear and rushed to the bathroom and turned on the shower, leaving it on wickedly cold. He stripped hurriedly and then threw himself under the spray. Predictably, the shock caused him to shrink. Still, his left appendage, shiny and chrome, rested on the temperature dial, tempting him to turn it towards hot and take his body’s ache to its climax and denouement.

He couldn’t. This was all messed up, imagining impossible things. He had to look at her, the Black Widow, in the eye as soon as he came down for breakfast. So pack the stupid, reckless, horny dreams away, Sergeant. He could try again to masturbate when this was all was done and he was hundreds of miles disappeared from the cabin. Would that be enough?

The phantom of her lithe, bared form danced temptingly through the fogged space behind his eyes, draped once again in that bedsheet. There was no scar where the through-and-through should be from the rifle round. The truth twisted his gut at last toward restraint. He had _shot_ her. There was footage. Irrefutably. The was blood and damage. There must be scars.

Sick fucks, he told himself as he shivered, counting himself among Them.

His silvery hand closed off the tap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was important to me how to establish consent in even an imagined sex scene, because Bucky needs autonomy-affirming stuff right now. Really needs it. 
> 
> I hope this takes the edge off the 'slow burn' stuff. Be assured that Natasha's chapter is going to have her own fantasy shortly.
> 
> My deep/old readers of this series may recognize Natasha-wrapped-in-sheet as something recreated from the past. ;-)


	23. Natasha

For years Natasha had saved up for this hideaway in the Rocky Mountains, religiously putting away a hefty chunk of her S.H.I.E.L.D. paycheck every month. The notion had started at the Barton’s farm, years ago, when Natasha grew to believing in chosen possessions for herself; she could even have a home of her own.

She often thought back to that Romanian cottage in the Carpathians, where for the first night ever, the Red Room had no say as to what they would do with their bodies and their hearts. The dam of restraint breaking, they rutted savagely at first, she and the man-beyond-the-Soldier she called ‘Alexei’ for the lack of any other name he could recall. Their couplings in the hours after that were more tender, and Natalia’s idea of devotion shifted forever. She didn’t give herself anymore to the Motherland; she gave herself to _him_.

Only a few months before the Battle of New York, Natasha had finished the final touches on this house as a way of being close to the brightest memories of him. Her mentor. Her lover. Her ghost.

It was reckless to bring James Buchanan Barnes to her refuge. He wasn’t what he had been to Natalia; HYDRA and the Red Room saw to that. The aftermath of Odessa’s failure could mean only more ‘recalibrations’ for the Asset, a final purging of pesky impulses, dangerous instincts. The fight on the streets of D.C. confirmed it; nothing was left of her Alexei.

Still, Natalia-within suggested, she could still have her fantasies. Barnes didn’t have to know.

* * *

When she heard her companion close the door to the guest bedroom upstairs, Natasha began shutting off the lights in the common spaces. She locked the doors only as a minor precaution. The woodsy furnishings and picture windows were for comfort and decoration; the real security measures were quite well hidden and quite literally, bombproof.

 _Tomorrow_ , she told herself. Tomorrow she’d go back into operational mode.

The ground-floor bathroom had two doors. One that could be accessed by guests in the great room, and one that passed further on into the master bedroom.

After brushing her teeth and disrobing, Natasha drew herself a hot bath. The claw-footed bath-tub was situated in the recess of bay windows that overlooked the peaks in the distance. The steam would obscure the stars from her, but she planned to soak with her eyes closed.

She pinned up her hair. She drizzled strawberry-scented bubble bath into the waters. She slipped in.

 _’Promise me, Natalia.’_ Find happiness. Find freedom.

He had tried to warn Natalia and urged her to defect to the West. He must have sensed new protocols etched into the Soldier as contingencies in the case of her defection, like a viper ready to strike should she do or say the wrong thing. The only thing she promised was not to abandon him, and that night’s choice had likely saved her from ‘retirement’ and an unmarked grave, even if it hadn’t saved them from separation or her from being manipulated by the Red Regime for years and years after.

If only the young, love-blinded operative had listened. The blood of so many innocents and decent people would not be on her hands in the attempt to earn Alexei back in by whatever twisted calculations were in the mind of their masters.

Natasha heard Barnes move in the upstairs, settling in the bed or perhaps finding some of Clint’s stuff in the drawers. At least he didn’t feel the need to stealth around. She’d talk to him in the morning that all two-hundred of her acres was his to roam about it and explore, that all of her…

Natasha shook her head, frowning as if she would to a child. “Don’t be silly,” she muttered.

Then don’t put in strawberry bubble bath and contemplate the feeling of his hands -- one body-hot and one air-cool encircling her waist -- drawing her closer, the Natalia-self rebutted.

From toe to neck, Natasha methodically scrubbed herself with a washcloth, knowing that however raw she made her skin, it wouldn’t wash away anything for long. She paused over her left hip, the dual patches of silvery skin fore and aft. S.H.I.E.L.D. had ways of cosmetically repairing scar-tissue, and now Bruce was talking about a Korean doctor --Chow? Choo? -- who had figured out how a person’s own stem cells could be matrixed into skin and muscle, knitted seamlessly with the existing tissue.

For the longest time, the scar was just about all she had left to link herself to him. Then on that street in D.C., Steve saw his own long-lost shade in the Winter Soldier, and Natalia needed more than her scar that night in Fury’s underground hide-out. Maybe a part of Cap intuited without being enlightened of her bone-deep, ancient ache for his blood-brother.

And if she finally confessed? When wouldn’t her chilling truths be taken as more of her keenly-crafted lies? Likely never. She had only one overriding purpose: keep the Avengers working together, trusting each other. All the other choices were slaves to that.

Natasha studied the downward spiral of the tub’s draining waters before she rinsed off the last of the soap under the chrome spigot. 

After she toweled off, she went to her nightstand and felt for the latch of a hidden bottom drawer, which held a small gun safe. She entered the combo and unsealed the box. There were only three things in the safe: a loaded pistol, an extra clip, and a satin-lined box about ten-inches long. Natasha took out the last, setting it between the down pillows.

She was still warm from the bath as she turned off the bedroom light and slid naked between the sheets. The darkness was best for her next clandestine act.

The metal of the gracefully-shaped object within the box that retained its cold from the hours in storage as Natasha took it in hand. One end was tapered with a slight hook, the other end flared wider, more blunt. The polished surface was almost slick.

It always began the same.

 _’Tell me…’_ She dragged the narrower tip between her breasts, feeling the coolness trail down to her navel. _’Tell me how you want this.’_

Everywhere, she answered.

It should have concluded the same. Natasha flipped on her stomach, thrusting the thicker end of the dildo as deep as she could into her core with long strokes while she ground her clit into a bunched up ball of blankets, straining to chase the memory along with her pleasure. The effort made no sound other than her small gasps and the rustling of sheets.

Only this time, his long-ago words were almost audible in her ear. Only this time, she could almost feel his breath on her neck, the weight of his hips trapping her on the mattress.

So close. She was so close. _He_ was so close.

Almost in reach. God, almost. Please. Just let him...

Almost was not enough tonight.

“Fuck,” Natasha whispered to her pillow, the _knowing_ that Barnes was just upstairs had caught up with her.

She extracted the thing, still hot with her want, but now a mere mockery of what her imagination truly craved. She wrapped the dildo in her bath towel to clean and put away in the morning, fuming that she couldn’t even manage to bring herself to an orgasm to soothe her soul and distract her body.

This job better go quick. Natasha began to worry that her resolve wouldn’t last many more of these nights.

* * *

The sun had been up for a few hours by the time her house-guest came downstairs, dressed for the day, shouldering his backpack. Barnes had even put on his boots.

“Good morning,” she greeted, concentrating on the done-ness of another pancake in the oiled cast-iron pan on the stove. 

“Yeah,” he returned, casually, setting down his bag. “You...um...want me to do anything? To help? Smells great.”

Great, Natasha thought. Back to the polite awkwardness. 

“Set the kitchen table,” she suggested, pointing with her spatula to the various cabinets and drawers and counters without so much as meeting his eyes. “Plates. Glasses. Silverware. Napkins. Juice in the fridge. Coffee in the French press there.”

“Sure,” he agreed, bringing a set of two of everything to the long table nearby.

When he was done with his domestic task and had poured them both beverages, she heard him settle into a dining chair and unzip his backpack. As she shut off the stove and took the bacon out of the oven and let the sizzling meat cool for a minute, Natasha casually watched Bucky extract some sort of waterproof stuff-sack from where he had stowed it.

“I figure you want to get started after breakfast,” he remarked. To the right of his plate he began to lay out the contents of the sack in a line. Blocks of hard drives at the start, followed by the thinner solid-state drives, then small USB thumbs.

Taking the platter of pancakes with her to deliver, Natasha walked around the table and studied the tech further. Twenty seven items. A few terabytes. Contents may be duplicated or not.

“Do you recall all the retrieval sites?” she asked, orbiting around the dining table again to get the bacon and the syrup she had warmed in the oven.

“Some. It was...a blur a lot of the time.”

It nearly turned her off her breakfast completely, but Natasha asked as she sat down. “And you got these from regular computers? Were any wired to any unique hardware or devices? That you can remember?” She could nearly smell the ozone again.

Her companion clenched his jaw and turned his head away towards the great room. “I didn’t retrieve those.” His adam’s apple bobbed once. “Doubt any of it’s salvageable now.” Natasha all but heard the ‘like me’ appending his judgment.

“Well, this is enough,” she concluded, forking a pancake on her plate and then pointedly handing him the serving implement. “And before I start diving into it, let’s talk about the house rules.”

Barnes took the fork from her warily. “Okay,” he returned slowly, taking his own stack.

Across the table, Natasha pushed him the butter dish. “Be home before dark.”

His mouth twitched as if it wasn’t what he was expecting. “The second rule?” He cut a pat of butter for himself precisely.

“That’s it. Everything else is negotiable.”

He shook his head slowly, possibly confused. “But--”

Natasha interrupted as she served herself the bacon. “Look, this property is over two-hundred square acres about in the American intersection of ‘no’ and ‘where’. I can’t concentrate on this work and be fretting over what you’re doing every minute. So just...explore. Do whatever you like. Read. Hike down to the stream. Count the number of wildflowers in the back meadow. Stop looking over your shoulder. Just be home before dark.”

It was the same rule she and the Barton family also kept when visiting here, but he had no way of knowing that.

“That’s fine,” Barnes agreed.

He eyed her suspiciously as he drizzled the syrup and cut into his breakfast. Finally, he stated, “I’d like to do the dishes.” Ah, those Brooklyn boys and their old-fashioned manners.

“Sounds fair,” Natasha returned, squashing a smile. She then witnessed him take the first bite of his breakfast, taste it, and then draw his plate closer to carve up the pile of pancakes, shoving each sweet and carbo-loaded forkful into his mouth and attending it with vigorous chews and swallows.

She sipped on her coffee, finished her smaller stack and her bacon, and tried not to think of how once he-but-not-Him had chided a young Black Widow not to wolf down the first real food they found in two days after being caught in a freak snowstorm.

While Bucky went for seconds, Natasha reached for one of the hard-drives. The thing still had its factory labeling on it, and she could compare it with her database to find when and where it may have been sold. A potential gold-mine against HYDRA. She turned it in her hand, weighing how the intel would go down when she brought it back to Steve and Sam and the others, from her ‘anonymous source’.

Barnes took a swig of his coffee, washing down his last bite. “Your equipment is in a basement, right? Or some sort of bunker out in the woods.”

She set the drive down. “Did the calculations?” Of course, he did. Barnes and Rogers were both tactically minded. It’s what made them the best their generation had to offer. 

“Didn’t see the room where you slept,” he noted, taking up his own coffee cup and glancing back over his shoulder to the short hallway leading into that section of the house. He cleared his throat before taking a sip. “But my bet would be underground.”

She didn’t bother dissembling, and wiped off the last taste of syrup from her lips. “We’re pretty much on top of it. You’re welcome to see.”

* * *

The kitchen had a small pantry. At the bottom of the pantry was a trap-door leading down via a ladder of metal rungs.

The room below was somewhat like their train accommodations with Murphy-style bunk beds that folded up into their cabinets when not in use and also a small bathroom. More canned goods and other supplies were stacked in a pantry of their own. There was even a bookshelf with reading and games. An imposing gun-safe stood at the far wall. The space was all painted white to make it seem larger and less claustrophobic.

Bucky followed her down, the collection of intel carried in the sack by his left hand while he negotiated the climbing. When he got to the bottom, he did his soldier’s assessment. “This is...not a storm cellar. A fallout shelter? Safe room?” 

“Yeah. Pretty much. It can only be locked from the inside.”

“I don’t understand. Where is the computer?”

Natasha went to the gun safe and rested her hand on the dial. “I’d appreciate it if you turn your back.” Not that he didn’t have the capability of bending and compromising the hinges, but even a metal-armed super-soldier would need time to do so.

When he looked away, she worked the combination (the four numbers spelled “S-T-A-R”) and the pulled the handle to the door of the safe that was nearly as tall as she was.

It opened up into a second room. Her secret room within the lodge’s secret room, where Black Widow kept all that defined her.

Natasha ducked, flipped another light switch, and went inside. “Come on in.”

Weapons lined both sides of the narrow room: automatic rifles, shotguns, handguns, tactical knives, batons, and even a few more esoteric items. Shallow lockers kept ammunition and her other, more customized, tech. But at the very end was a desk, flanked by two monitors on the side and two in the front in a crude crescent. And above that desk in metal shelving, turned off and dormant, was the clustered network of dedicated processors she would use for this job.

She turned the ergonomic chair in front of her station and sat within it. “Go ahead, make the trap-door spider jokes.”

Barnes moved cautiously as he followed, glancing around at her arsenal. He said nothing.

She extended her hand out for the bundle of hard-drives just as slowly. “This locks from the inside, too. There’s a Faraday cage built into the paneling. ”

He passed on the intel to her, almost with ceremonial slowness. He finally asked, “How long will it take?”

Natasha set the drives down next to her keyboard and began flipping on the backup power supply system to her workstation. “Won’t know till I start. Depends on the strength of the encryptions. Bypassing any executables that may overwrite the data or compromise my system.”

He frowned and pushed back his long hair from his face. “I don’t know what a lot of that means.”

“It means...” she clarified, spinning her chair around and finding the master switch to start booting everything up. There was a loaded pistol also under her desk if she needed it. “...I’ll have an update for you tonight.”

From behind her, Barnes sighed and started moving back towards the hidden entrance. “Then I guess I’ll...be back before dark.”

After she heard him scale up to the ground floor, Natasha let herself have a deep, tremoring sigh. 

Years ago, at her Academy, Natalia had clandestinely hacked the Soldier’s programming so he would remember that first fateful mission they shared and recall what it was like to desire something beyond completion of orders and objectives. Most importantly, she had crafted the way, in the lines of altered code and between his wipes, how he could remember _her_.

Her same skillset had saved Tony Stark from being gunned down by Colonel Rhode’s hijacked suit during the Stark Expo in Queens. _’You have your friend back.’_

How many memories would this tango with HYDRA’s files revive? Not necessarily in him, but in her?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome, new subscribers! Your interest warms my heart.
> 
> I'll try to get the next Bucky chapter done in December, and I've also signed up for [ @fuckyeahbuckynatasha's Secret Santa exchange.](http://fuckyeahbuckynatasha.tumblr.com/secretsanta) So you have that to look forward to as well!


	24. Bucky

Bucky first tasked himself with cleaning up their breakfast. He washed the dishes and silverware and pans by hand even though there was a dishwasher. The appliance was one of those inventions in the past seventy years that he had, in both his time as HYDRA’s and his time laying low, never recalled using. It was obscure and he was unsure of how to place everything.

When he finally rinsed off his hands, he realized that he wouldn’t be forced to put a glove on his left to hide it while he was here in this place, this _sanctuary_ of hers.

He gazed again out the window above the sink, where there was a flagstone patio and what appeared to be a firepit out in the rear of the lodge. Beyond that, the alpine meadow she had spoken of, speckled with tiny dabs of color. Those wildflowers.

Make himself at home, Natasha had told him. Explore. He tried to reconcile that this wasn’t a stake out. He didn’t need to evaluate points of entry and plan to execute his escape strategies. 

Explore. Like he was a boy again, left with long hours to himself to feed his curiosity. Could he take that up again, innocently, like one may remaster a bicycle? Or was he forever locked out of that world?

“Jesus,” he swore under his breath. “This shouldn’t be so fucking hard.”

He pushed himself away from the sink, frowning, and convinced himself that doing an ‘interior sweep’ was a decent enough place to start.

Buck found the mudroom and the home’s clothes washer and dryer with the secondary exit. He then turned around, walked past the pantry/secret entry to the safe room, and hooked left, where he found the door to what he assumed was Natasha’s bedroom, left cracked open. Her bed was made. There was a closet that abutted the pantry (which could mean a secondary way into the basement). 

He couldn’t bring himself to take any step into her space. He had no place in it. 

The bathroom on the ground floor seemed both to serve her master bedroom and the first floor. The tub seemed like it was rescued from another era.

Linen closet with sheets and towels.

He strode past the main entry-way from the front of the lodge, the frosted and beveled glass giving decoration and hinting at the season that had its greatest influence over this alpine roost: winter.

In the great room a pair of snowshoes from the previous century hung over the flag-stone fireplace, quaint and hinting at adventure. Rustic-designer furniture with Native American motifs in the upholstery semi-circled the fireplace and its potraitly and majestic view of a few peaks of Rocky mountains to the northwest. The beginnings of Glacier National Park, he guessed.

Built-in bookcases, the same wood and stain of the wall paneling itself, were filled with classic titles, many of older or collectors’ editions. With the exception of JRR Tolkien, they were all works of American authors: Louis L’Amour, Hemingway, Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Jack London and Willa Cather caught him furrowing his brow at something not quite within his grasp. When his finger lingered on _’Leaves of Grass’_ , vague snippets of recited lines flitted through his thoughts like garden-wondering butterflies drunk on summer nectar.

Later, he promised the aged, green-bound volume. He’d come back to it later.

A shallow cabinet below the books revealed a disc player and a small control console for what appeared to be a wireless sound-system. Bucky had noticed two small speakers discretely mounted in the corners of the great room. But there was no television, no--what was it called?-- gaming console, to be seen. Reading and listening to music was the only leisurely entertainment to be had other than gazing at the landscape.

Bucky straightened himself and came face-to-face with a mounted framed sketch measuring about a foot by foot and a half wide, done in pencil. Wolves in motion, coursing through a snowy, alpine forest. They were hunters, a pack. The lines of the drawing tempered realism with the abstract. He counted seven creatures through the trunks and needles. Seven. All unique. All united.

And in the corner, a signature blended into a trunk: _S G Rogers_.

It nearly knocked the air out of him.

How did Romanoff come to own this? Display it here as a cherished item?

Buck got his wits about him and looked at each one of the subjects. There. Just behind the leader, slightly smaller, ran another with cunning, surveilling eyes and sleek, dark fur.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Natasha’s slightly-echoed voice was to his right. He glanced to find her filling up a steel water-bottle at the kitchen sink. God. He had been so mesmerized, he didn’t even hear her climb back up from the Underground.

She must have read something in his posture, and she left the bottle on the counter to approach him.

“It’s Steve’s,” he said, dumbly.

“Genuine,” she returned, squaring shoulder-to-shoulder with him to gaze upon the drawing as if they were in a museum. “You must have questions.”

Where was he to begin? 

Perhaps sensing his hesitation, Natasha crossed her arms, and began without him. “Rogers gave it to me a few years back as a Christmas present, when we were all coming together post-S.H.I.E.L.D.. I thought it belonged here.”

“Is it us?” he asked, still trying to find his words.

“The Howling Commandos?” Natasha offered, stepping closer to the glass. “Yeah. I think so. See?” She pointed to one of them sniffing the air. “That’s Private Morita...your communications guy. At least, I guess it is. Steve’s never really told me, and I didn’t ask. But everything was on display back in the Smithsonian, you know?”

The dizzy confusion-frustration was now rising from his belly once again.

“There’s more than that,” he challenged. 

“I could point out the others,” she replied mildly. “You figured out yourself yet?”

Bucky tried to take it all in. A present. Intimately inspired. Intimately drawn. From Steve to her. Not as his Captain-self, but as someone different, someone who wanted to share with her the older, the deeper…

If it wasn’t Barton, was it Steve? He ignored the hot-then-cold sensation in his face.

“I think you’re very special to him,” Bucky pronounced, keeping his eyes on the drawing.

“You think Rogers and I are lovers?” she replied, dryly.

Would he be an absolute cad for proposing ‘yes’? Why did this feel like both a test and a trap?

Buck replied lamely. “It’d make a lot of sense.”

Natasha sighed and then turned to look at him directly. “We dabbled once. But he’s not the kind of person that would lay down the fight as long as there is a just cause to be fought for. He’d never run away and let go enough to make another life. Steve and I, we work as partners in other ways. That's just how it is.” 

Well, that sounded enough like the truth. 

“But if you found someone that wanted to make another life? That you liked?” God, why was he asking that? First this morning’s wet dream and now inquiring of Natasha if she had ever contemplated riding off into the horizon with one of her teammates or someone else entire.

Natasha chilled right down and he knew he had overstepped. “‘What ifs’ have their place, Barnes. You’ll find them in the same reading section as the fairytales.”

She then walked away, snatching her water bottle, and disappeared again into the pantry and down-below.

Well, fuck.

“You’re an idiot,” he whispered to himself for probably the tenth time in this whole endeavor.

It was probably better for them both if he made himself scarce, so he grabbed his coat and decided to explore outside instead.

He first went into the garage, turning on the overhead light as he went. He was surprised to see a small motorcycle frame covered in a clear plastic sheeting, its engine removed and the parts laid out on another tarp before it. The Soldier immediately recognized it as a dual-sport, for road or dirt-biking, of Japanese make, about fifteen years old. As he circled the half-dismantled thing, he saw the oil-stained repair manual along with the block.

Bucky didn’t touch anything, but figured it may be worthwhile asking Natasha about it should she ever resurface. 

A well-stocked tool-chest and other items typical of home repair lined the garage walls. There was a large stainless-steel sink in a corner. complete with it's manual pump as she had said.

Then he found the fishing gear. A tackle box. Elegant rods on a rack above a workbench used for tying flies. 

_’Worms and bobbers and lazy rivers? That’s not how it goes up here. Up here in trout country? Well, that’s a different animal, son.’_ He re-witnessed the sweeping flick-flick-flicks of the leader line. The whip of the tippet cast on the glass-clear surface, presenting the fly as an undeniable temptation. The memory flashed a silvery tail and then sunk back into the currents from whence it came.

Did he? Could he still?

This house was supposed to be a survivalists’ retreat for a handful of people to live out and beyond the destabilization and the collapse of nation and infrastructure. It was its own little world with its own concerns that on the surface had little to do with espionage, infiltration, and the very geopolitical forces that made this whole endeavor necessary in the first place.

If it wasn’t for the work she was doing in the Underground’s computers, this safe-house was unequivocally the most _opposite_ of whom the Black Widow was legended to be. Housing him here, she might as well have upended who _he_ thought himself to be, too.

Another of her spiraling webs, he reasoned. The silkiest of strands, the most delicate of casts to hook him.

“I can’t,” Buck re-affirmed, feeling the tension by which he was strung and ever kept apart.

The Jeep could be wired. Hell, if he even wanted, he could walk down and out and down even more by finding following a creek as it merged with others and catch a real road eventually and escape.

But then he couldn’t do his own part against HYDRA. To make up for---

He found himself with his hands stuck deep into his pockets out of habit, standing in the middle of the wildflower field fifty yards from the structure.

If Buck screamed at all his ghosts just now, he was certain the flowered meadow and the pines and the foothills would swallow it all up, unjudging to what was once done.

Loosed, he fell on his ass, tucked up his knees and laughed and rocked. Laughed for a while like a madman who had just gotten his high. He stripped off his jacket and his shirt, revealing his pale chest and metallic arm to the openness. The nippy morning breeze caressed his bared skin.

Bucky held out both arms and tossed himself down prone, and then just gazed and gazed at the azure sky and summery puffs of clouds before him. He felt the scratchiness of the grass and arid soil on his back.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t cry.

Instead, arching back, sucking in the purest of airs to prepare him, he howled. Savage and free and glorious. Like those wolves of Steve’s imagining, gifted somehow again to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last post-credit in Black Panther gave me all the Bucky feels. The fact that he is acknowledged as a "wolf" in the movies, when I've been exploring that theme for _years_ in these fics, gives me all sorts of happy.


	25. Natasha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent a lot of time last month dealing with RL stuff and then dealing with the tiredness of dealing with RL stuff. Thanks for the patience. This Infinity War lead-up is also distracting in that horribly good _way._

Natasha had a small closed-circuit fisheye camera installed in the kitchen near the entrance to the underground retreat. From there, she could monitor the space leading to the pantry, useful for identifying anyone attempting access to the bunker without sticking their head through the unsealed gopherhole. 

As soon as Barnes had left her, she initialized the black-and-white fisheye and kept its feed running in a upper righthand corner of her right monitor as she worked. Once she witnessed him settle into cleaning up breakfast as he said he would, she ignored it for doing the first part of her investigation into HYDRA’s files: a physical exam of all the drives.

Her latex gloves strapped on, Natasha also donned a clear, plastic face-shield before taking something resembling a dentist tool and carefully examining each of the various ports and pins and holes in the technology for booby-traps. It was tedious work, and so she cued up an EDM demo CD she had once gotten somewhere in Florida that had just enough tempo and energy to keep her focused.

She wouldn’t have to do this if she could completely trust her guest’s mindstate and story of his raids. If there were any IP addresses recorded, at least she’d be able to cross-check any of Barnes’ reportedly-identified HYDRA strongholds with Tony’s private satellites and drones. But that verification could only happen after she returned to the Tower.

The Avengers had agreed to work on eliminating HYDRA and cleaning up the last of the Chitauri tech _together_. Their one mission statement that kept even Bruce in the game, because they each to a person had failed to see the dark underbelly of S.H.I.E.L.D., also losing track of Loki’s Sceptre. 

There was an Avengers’ rule: Natasha and the others could do whatever they wanted as clandestine side-jobs, compartmentalize as much as required. But any action against HYDRA using team (meaning Tony’s) resources was a joint effort. That agreement was one of the only bridges to trust they had.

So here we are, Natasha reminded herself. The billionaire with the means to win this fight once and for all knew _nothing_ of her houseguest who quite possible was the very instrument of his parents death. Simply fucked up.

Natasha glanced again at her monitor. The assassin had left the kitchen and was walking around the bottom floor of the sun-drenched chalet, stalking the surroundings to better study his new environment.

She had framed Steve’s drawing and Christmas gift in a streak of sentimentality, the one he made for her after a tip from Clint that Natasha had a long interest in wolves. How would Barnes react? Would he even guess at the full significance?

She set down her work, peeled off her protective gear, and climbed back up to the kitchen, finding the excuse to get herself some water.

Natasha found Barnes studying the sketch intensely, and her stomach clenched. Could he remember any of the layered pasts that inspired it?

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, leaving her drink behind to stand by him.

 _’You know, I won’t eat you, Red. Not unless you ask me to.’_ The ancient play of words, of the girl with the crimson cloak and the Big Bad Wolf, teased at Natasha’s recollection. One sharpened-toothed killer to the other.

“It’s Steve’s.” The puzzled look -- brows knitting, lips slightly puckered -- begged for her to ask what he most wanted to learn about the history of it all.

“Genuine,” she answered, knowing that Steve would have been giddy for Bucky to recognize his sketching style and signature. “A Christmas gift. I thought it belonged here.”

He then dropped a bomb of a question, looking back and forth from her to the drawing. “Is it us?” 

Yes, it once was something alike and something different. Natalia and her fellow wolf, secreted in the forest, free of their masters for all-to-brief a time. 

“The Howling Commandos?” she deflected, approaching the work to scan her eyes over the sleek-furred creature running beside the pack leader to the figures that did not needle at her loss.

Barnes wasn’t satisfied. “There’s more than that.” She tried to deflect once more, as if they were sparring, but he didn't back down. “I think you’re very special to him.” 

She debated snapping at him that, yes, she and Rogers had fucked in Nick Fury’s hideout, both heartsick that night -- she for the lover taken from her, Steve for his blood-brother. The guilt of her secret and the need to form a _new_ pack with Tony Stark was the cold reality that forced Natasha’s hand to return to a platonic distance with Steve. Keep it all locked away.

Natasha casually wove one of her half-truths in explaining why a romance couldn’t happen between them. “We work as partners in other ways.”

He continued in his probing, looking her in the eye. “But if you found someone that wanted to make another life? That you liked?” 

Natasha knew when she was dangerously on the edge of breaking apart. The Avengers -- even the world -- depended on her not to. So the Black Widow summoned cynicism to layer over her deep frustrations and Natalia’s longing. “‘What ifs’ have their place, Barnes. You’ll find them in the same reading section as the fairytales.”

She turned her back and stocked away so as not to look at his face and be able to compose herself again in her solitude.

* * *

Natasha spent the next few hours throwing herself into her work, even turning off the upstairs’ camera so as not to be distracted. 

The sooner it was done, the sooner Barnes would be on his way. She’d drop him off at the train station for destination Anywhere; she’d take another train to a major city’s safehouse, shed her personas, and make a call in for a quinjet to pick her up.

Eventually, she heard a knock on the safe-door that had a certain metallic ring to it.

“What’s up?” she spoke into the microphone that transmitted into the shelter on the other side.

 _“I thought you might like lunch,”_ her guest returned.

When she opened up, Natasha found Barnes standing with a filled plate in one hand. The scent of peanut butter and fruitiness wafted under her nose, and she realized that she was a bit hungry. 

He looked more at the sandwich and the watermelon slices then at her, shyly. “I didn’t know what you liked, so it’s just peanut-butter and jelly. I’m not that great of a cook.”

“Thanks,” she said neutrally, reaching her hand out to take the food. “It’s just fine.” Had she not been rattled about the talk of Steve, she may have even found his ‘apology’ touching.

As soon as she took the plate, Barnes dragged his fingers through his ragged hair. “What’s going on with the motorcycle in the garage?”

She shrugged. “Clint got it for a song because it didn’t run and he wanted to tinker with it. Just a project that he hasn’t gotten around to finishing, if ever.”

Natasha took a bite of her sandwich, figuring Barnes had looked around much of the property and now was looking for something else to occupy his time. After she swallowed, she licked a little dab of grape jelly from the corner of her mouth.

“You’re welcome to give it a go,” Natasha offered.

He looked to the ceiling. The skin at the corner of his eyes lifted minutely and there was a little twitch to the corners of his mouth. Boyish enthusiasm peeked through his seriousness and then hid itself again.

“Alright,” he agreed, then cleared his throat. “I guess I’ll leave you alone.”

She took her meal back into her hideaway with her, and made appearances to shut the safe-door behind her. Natasha, however, didn’t close it immediately. Through a crack, she watched Barnes scale up the rung ladder with eagerness.

It was her turn to allow herself a hint of a smile.


End file.
